A Halloween Tango Story

               Desmond looked at his watch again. It was past 4 a.m. and she was late. Dr. Marta Van Vorst was always late. He had no choice but to wait and not complain. The moist night air of the old wooden dock smelled oddly of fresh-baked pastries.

               Ten long minutes later, her small, green, hybrid car rolled silently onto the wharf by the Hudson River in lower Manhattan, where he waited.

               He speculated that she appeared much too calm for a woman who had such a disturbing effect on his libido. 

               He’d met her two weeks ago at a tango gathering called a milonga, a place where tango, and only tango, is danced all night long and often until nearly dawn.

               He'd found her absolutely captivating ever since their first encounter and entertained thoughts that she had magical, bewitching powers over him. There was something about her that he found intoxicating and as addictive as a drug. He felt it oddly strange that he was so attracted to her.

               They had been dancing together less than an hour ago at a milonga when she asked him to meet her here.

               He stood mesmerized as her long legs slid out of her tiny vehicle. It was late October and the chilly night air had become cold enough to fog her breath. Tango music emanated through the open window of her ride.

               “You didn’t stop for coffee, I hope,” Marta said as she stood before him, dressed in a long leather coat, stockings and high heels.

               “No,” Desmond replied, regretting that it hadn’t occurred to him. He was very tired and could have used a cup of joe right about now. He’d been dancing all night and his brain was getting numb when she invited him to this eerie place beside the water.

               She was a professor of quantum physics at Columbia University and he was surprised that she would be interested in someone like him, an electrician who never finished college.

               “Are you tired?” She asked.

               Somewhat puzzled, he answered instinctively, thinking it would be a turnoff for her if he actually admitted that he was tired.

               “No, not really,” he lied.

               Her voice could not hide her disappointment. “You need to be almost ready to sleep for you to see her. How old are you? Don’t you smell the pies?”

               He found her line of questioning bizarre and frustrating. His temper started to rise. It was extremely late and he was beat. He didn’t want to be playing these games. She was a good-looking woman; it should be obvious to her why he agreed to come down to the docks at four in the morning.

               “Yes,” he responded, curtly, “I smell pastries or something, and yes, I am tired. I’m forty-three and too old to be looking for cookies at four a.m. on a wharf in New York City. Is someone else coming?”

               She looked at him directly with her deep, dark eyes and he was back under her spell. When he saw her thick brown hair and dark red lips, his anger dissipated.

               He took her in with his gaze.  When he spied her long, stocking-clad legs extending from inside her coat, he remembered the short skirt she was wearing at the milonga; the wolf inside him began to stir with a hunger for her body.

               Another woman was coming? He had never been in a ménage a trois before; maybe tonight was the night. Was he ready? She said, “she,” right?

               “Don’t worry,” Marta assured him, “and get your mind out of the gutter.” 

                Her eyes glanced down at the erection in his pants and he blushed heavily. 

                “We can take care of that later,” she said, as if this wasn't the most embarrassing thing in the world.

               When she smiled and winked at him, his anxiety disappeared. Knowing this was not all in vain gave him the strength to control the animal inside of him. It was a good thing he was older, he thought, if he’d been a young man, he never would have had the will power to keep his hands off of her.

               It was an incredibly sensual moment for him: the dim light, the sound of the river mixing with the tango music from her car; this seductive woman with whom he’d been dancing with all night. This was not a game for boys to play.

               “It’s time!” she exclaimed. Unzipping her coat, she invited him to embrace her. “Let’s dance and then you will see her.”

               He was too tired and too infatuated with her to wonder about who this other woman was. Once he saw her short black skirt and her breasts pushing against her black cashmere sweater, he simply obeyed and moved to join her.

               “Just walk to the music,” she whispered in his ear.

               The wind from her words brushed his ear and he nearly climaxed. He was tired and was struggling the subdue the animal inside of him. He needed to move to the melody. She relaxed into his embrace as their torsos united, her soft bosom melting into his chest. He could feel his brain going numb.

               He tried to convince himself that this was enough. If this was all that came of their relationship, then he would be satisfied. The wolf retreated back to its lair.

               He lost himself in her scent. She smelled of milk and grapes and other sweet things. Her silky, soft hair pressed against his cheek as he thought he must be falling asleep.

               Her head nearly blocked his vision. With his left eye he could see her ear and the back of her skull as they moved to the songs in a tango trance. 

               Beyond, he could see a single, dim light illuminating the end of the wooden pier and a white figure rising up from the river in the form of a stout, old woman. She was carrying what seemed like a large basket. The smell of fresh baked pastries was stronger now than it had been since he arrived. 

               The apparition stood at the end of the wharf for a long time.

               The image of the elderly lady was so white that she did not seem real to him. When he realized that she was not real, the hair stood up on the back of his neck. Adrenaline shot through all his limbs like lightning from the clouds. 

               He was electrified!

               Marta knew what was happening and asked, “You see her, don’t you?”

               Desmond didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. Every cell in his body was quivering. He stopped dancing and stared at the spirit. Her form seemed to be fluid, and, even though she was standing still, she seemed to be floating.

               For a moment, he thought he must be dreaming. He seemed to be in that place he went to just before drifting off to sleep. He knew he was not asleep because he had heard Marta speak. When he convinced himself that he was indeed awake and staring at, what he could only describe as a ghost, that is when it suddenly disappeared.

               Marta felt his body spasm and said, “She’s gone, isn’t she? You saw her, didn’t you? I am not crazy.”

               They left the pier and met at her loft not far away. The apartment was cluttered with papers and clothes. She cleared a space on a large white sofa and they sat together, his arm slung over her shoulders as she snuggled into his chest.

               “The woman you saw on the dock was the first one I’d discovered on purpose,” Dr. Van Vorst explained as she played with the buttons on his shirt.

               “I stumbled upon the phenomenon accidentally," she said,  "nearly five years ago, at the milonga where we met. I was nearly falling asleep on the dance floor when I first saw them. It was right around Halloween, about this time of the year. At three in the morning, I was suddenly surrounded by all these white, flowing figures of couples dancing the tango.

               For the first time in my life I had decaffeinated and gotten it all out of my system. It was a struggle to keep dancing without my usual coffee crutch. I came back the next night, after a good night’s sleep but I didn’t see them again. I returned the next three nights in a row. Finally, on the third night, I saw them again. I was extremely drained and it was nearly dawn.

               It seems that the caffeine in my system was depressing some sort of intuitive ability of mine that enables me to see these, these…things, these people from the past.

               Once I had deduced that I wasn’t seeing things, they disappeared and I didn’t see them again for another year. I nearly went crazy trying to find them again.

               “Wow,” Desmond said as he breathed out a sigh, “that’s quite a story. How’d you learn about the woman on the dock?”

               She replied, with more than a hint of pride in her voice, “That was just some good old-fashioned scientific process.”

               She smiled and looked up at him.

               For the first time since he’d known her, he noticed that there were dark circles beneath her eyes. For a brief moment, he worried that she might be psychotic and have homicidal tendencies. He looked around the room for telltale signs of coffins, zombies and weapons of mass destruction. When she lay her head back down on his chest, his fears dissolved.

               “For the next four years,” she continued, sounding as if she was recanting a confession, “I set about establishing exactly when the apparitions would materialize. I found that I could only observe them if I was on the verge of falling asleep or in that trance-like state you get into when you’ve been dancing tango all night with a dreamy partner…like you.”

               She smiled and nuzzled her head into his frame with those last words and continued, “I’m certain they only become visible during the week of Samhain, right around Halloween. Samhain is the Celtic word for the end of the harvest season, when, in the middle latitudes, there is more darkness in the day than sunlight.

               Desmond, what we are seeing are not ghosts, rather, we are looking through a window into the past. As we travel through time, we somehow leave a trail of our passage. When we are in the right state of mind and the earth is at the proper point in its orbit, the…., I’ll call them echos, the echos of our ancestors are revealed to us.

               The universe is constantly expanding. It is my belief that one end of the cosmos is illuminated and spewing forth matter. The other end is dark and drawing in all the light and the matter into itself.   

               I think that, when the Earth is at a particular point in its revolution around the Sun, the illumination from the beginning of the universe shines on these apparitions and we are able to see them, if we are in the proper state of mind.

               Not all echos have the same staying power, nor are they able to be viewed by everybody. We have to be connected in some way to the people who created these echos in the first place.

               That woman we saw tonight, I believe she is my great-great-great Aunt Tula.

               In the early 1700s, she baked meat pies on the family farm in, what would become, Jersey City. Twice a week, she would paddle across the Hudson River to sell her pies and pastries in New York City, when it was still a small town on the Hudson River.

               I found a pencil drawing in the Van Vorst family library of her wearing the same scarf as the old woman we saw tonight. There is an inscription on it that reads Tula.

               It took me two years to realize the conditions for a sighting were only ripe during the week of Samhain.  

               That first week of discovery, I didn’t see the echos anywhere else but here. I took a wild guess and hypothesized that I must be drawn to this place for some other reason than my love of tango. I wondered if they didn’t show up at other places where I loved to dance.

               I went to all of them. It was on the last night of the cycle that I found Tula at the wharf where people sometimes held impromptu milongas. 

               I smelled the pies and thought it strange because there were no bakeries nearby. Then I saw her. I burned her image into my brain and had a therapist help me recall the memory while an artist was present. We were able to create a drawing of her and that’s how I found out her name.”

               Marta lifted her head and nodded toward the far wall where a large charcoal drawing of a woman was framed beneath a cover of glass.

               She placed her head back on Desmond's torso and began where she had left off, “The story of Tula’s pie-selling business has been handed down in my family for generations. She and I share the same DNA. I think that is why I was drawn to that particular dock. It is where she crossed the river, over three hundred years ago!”

               As she finished her last sentence, the sun began to rise and its light reflected off the buildings of the Jersey City waterfront.

               Marta fell asleep on Desmond's lap.  

               It seemed as if his eyelids had just closed when she was suddenly shaking him.

               “Get up,” she said, slightly agitated, “we must not be too rested or we’ll fail to achieve the proper meditative state. No coffee! No caffeine! No chocolate! We’ve got to be ready.”

               His nerves were shot. He looked down and noticed he had a huge erection.

               She saw it, too.

               “That’s going to be a distraction,” she stated nonchalantly, “we’ll have to make sure this doesn’t pop up at the wrong time or will miss them.”

               She was now wearing a bright red bathrobe. She loosened the belt and allowed it to slip off her shoulders to the ground.       

               Grabbing him by the hand, she led him to the bedroom and said, “I guess I know what we’re going to be doing for the next few hours.”

              

               They spent the rest of the day in bed and had a late dinner. She suggested that they take a long walk before the dance, to increase their fatigue, she said. He assured her that he would be plenty tired when 3 a.m. rolled around, especially after their vigorous love-making session.

               She conceded that point with a smile and the pair made their way to the milonga.

               He hardly felt like dancing but the women that night were persistent and wouldn’t let him stay seated for any length of time. Once, he almost fell over sideways but Marta caught him and escorted him onto the dance floor.

               When the music was playing and he held her in his arms, he was surprised to find that he had the stamina to navigate the crowd successfully.

               On the back wall of the dance studio was a large mural that covered it completely. It was a painting of a tango gathering and he guessed that all the people depicted in it were famous dancers.

               The normal length of a tango engagement between two people consists of a series of songs called a tanda. There can be three, four or five songs in a tanda. The end of the tanda comes when a short clip of non-tango music is played. This music is called the cortina, or curtain, because it separates the tandas.

               Normally, at a milonga, the couples separate when the cortina is play but Marta insisted they keep dancing. 

               The time was coming near, she whispered, obviously exhausted.

               Thirty minutes later, he could barely stand. His calves felt like bricks. If it wasn’t for the music, the scent of her hair and the softness of her breasts pressing into him, he felt certain he’d fall asleep standing up.

               He was fixating on the mural of the dancers on the wall when he saw them. All of a sudden the room was filled with a crowd of shimmering pale tango dancers, dressed in the fancy styles of yesteryear.

               Every hair on his body stood up as they had the night before. He could see the white phantoms all so very clearly.

               This time he was not jolted out of his trance-like condition. He could sense that Marta saw them, too. He tried to dance around them but they were everywhere. The real dancers moved right through them.

               “I…I see them, Marta,” he said, timidly.

               She replied, “Me, too, Desmond. Me, too.”

               She pushed her head against his and shut her eyes as she trusted him to guide her around the room.

               “Do you see us?” she asked.

               Puzzled, he began to look at the couples individually. A pair of phantoms moved right through him and Marta which made his body shiver. He felt her shudder, too.  As the forms traveled through the space occupied by their bodies, he came eye-to-eye with a spirit that looked just like him. Except for its ashen color, it was the mirror image of him.

               Oblivious to his presence, it looked right through him. The specter-Desmond spun around in a fancy tango maneuver and he noticed that his counterpart was dancing with a woman who looked just like Marta.

               “Marta,” he said, shakily, “I see them. I see us. I don’t know how…..but that’s us.”

               She stopped him, saying, “That’s how I knew to pick you, Desmond. It seems that we’ve always danced together; back then, now and I guess we always will………….but the next time you have to find me.”

The End

              

              

              

              

              

              

               

Cosmic Mind Blowing Shit…and Tango

               I have a nice desk here in Fargo. It is very conducive to writing. There is a window in front of me and I can watch the wind blow against the trees and the clouds roll across the sky. It is a good situation in which to ponder the larger concepts of life.......and how they relate to tango:-)

               Last month, Candace B. Pert died. I read her obituary in the New York Times. She was the scientist who discovered the opiate receptor which is the place where endorphins are bound in the brain. Basically, she revealed the physical connection between emotions and the brain. It was a tremendous breakthrough for real science.

               I mention her because she is an important figure in something I’ve been studying called the Law of Attraction. If you want to meet charlatans and crazy people, this is the field for you. I believe, however, that there is a grain of truth to this theory, so I pursue it in spite of the company it keeps. 

               Maybe I'm a crazy charlatan, too;-)

               The Law of Attraction simply states that like attracts like. If you think good thoughts, good things will happen and vice versa.

               It travels in the same circles as homeopathic medicine which suggests that like cures like. This is the premise of my latest book, Fear of Intimacy and the Tango Cure. If you are sick, a homeopathic remedy will use a similar poison to the one that made you sick. I was uncomfortable being near people and I cured my discomfort by dancing tango, which put me in close physical contact with many people.

               I discovered tango long before I ever heard of the Law of Attraction. However, since my days as a whitewater river guide living in rural towns at the headwaters of several beautiful mountain streams, I ran into quite a few people whose interests intersected this field of study.

               Over the course of time, I was exposed to more disciples of this quasi-scientific principle as well as to homeopathy.

               My sister-in-law introduced me to Edgar Cayce, a great proponent of the Law of Attraction and a renowned prophet of the 1930s and 1940s. He lived in Virginia Beach where he prescribed cures and predictions through the mail. 

               The river guides in North Carolina educated me on the many types of medicinal plants that could be found in the forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains and then sold to homeopathic practitioners.

               In Durango, Colorado, a very special woman asked me to watch a movie called What the #$*! Do We Know!? It attempts to prove the Law of Attraction but there are many leaps of faith that must be made in order to accept their claims as facts, such as the one made by a Japanese artist that beautiful pictures of snowflakes were caused by happy emotions.

               Durango, and much of the American Southwest, is filled with students of this philosophy as well as homeopathy. It goes well with yoga and, surprisingly, with tango.

               Like religious preachers, the faithful proselytize and ask me to accept their teachings using dichotomous facts such as this: microwaves are bad because radiation is bad and, therefore, eating food that has been microwaved is bad for you.

               As a technician in the cellular phone industry, I have a solid understanding of microwaves and I don’t see a connection between food that is heated by them and my health. If I was being inundated by microwaves, that would be a different story.

               When I ask how I can measure the validity of their statements, they scowl at me and wander off.  I don’t want to hurt their feelings but it seems like a logical question to ask.

               Fargo is the philosophical opposite of Durango. Here they drink beer in 22 ounce buckets, eat their meats breaded and deep-fried, (called fleischkuekle) and the farmers pound the ground with chemicals to produce as much corn as possible. With one hand they push the government away and the other they hold out for ethanol subsidies.

               Candace B. Pert was a real scientist who did not hesitate to think outside the box. She was not afraid to ask why the placebo effect worked when most other scientists ignored its existence. How could the body heal itself with a fake remedy? She gave an audience to the people who studied the Law of Attraction and other fringe science concepts such as intuition, déjà vu and love.

               Since I’ve been dancing tango, a horrible monster that was inside of me steadily shrank until it disappeared. I’m not sure what it was but it was always there, gnawing away at my innards. An examination of over 250 of my blog posts on the subject of tango, helped me to see that the dance was indeed a homeopathic remedy for what ailed me: a fear of intimacy.

               I was sick but I didn’t know it in my brain; my heart was aware that there was a problem and it led me to tango. I knew it was the right thing to do, intuitively, and I was cured.

               The tango embrace is full of fringe science phenomena. The acts of leading and following can be nearly impossible for some people to grasp, yet others can do it right away, almost instinctively.(Instinct, there’s another topic for fringe science to study.) Some people are so good at bringing me into the tango embrace that I feel as if they’ve connected with me telepathically.

               Making the tango connection is an acquired skill but it could easily be a subject of fringe science. With practice, almost anybody can do it. I guess it’s like hypnotism and it requires the ability to become relaxed. My partner relaxes because I am relaxed and she miraculously becomes susceptible to subtle suggestions of weight changes and directions of movement.

               I am always fascinated by how well a great tango instructor has mastered the art of making the tango connection. They don’t look at people, they look into people, grab them by the soul and lead them into movements they never thought they could do.

               I’ve heard people say they are drawn to this dance because of the music. It is my belief that many people who take up tango have been hurt deeply. To describe a milonga as a homeopathic healing session is all too easy since tango music is so full of stories of pain and the people who dance to it are often hurting inside.

               Here is something else that fascinates me about tango music: even though the words of most tango songs are in another language, we can sense the meaning of the melody and we find solace in words we do not even understand.  

               When I am successful at making the tango connection and my partner is anxious, she becomes calm. A happy woman will have the same effect on me when I am uncomfortable.

               I’ve seen this many times at milongas, where a happy person will dance with different people around the room throughout the course of the night and light them up like candles. One happy person can change the mood of an entire crowd and, unfortunately, one depressed person can share their depression with the whole gathering.

               As I look out the window, I notice that the wind has died down and the clouds have disappeared. Looking at the clear, bright blue sky makes me feel good. I wonder if the Universe did that just for me, just to make me happy. I’ll never know for certain but I’m sure glad it did!

               

Something More Than Sex

        There is an old saying, “there are some things better than sex and some things worse than sex but there is nothing quite like sex."

        Tango is a lot like sex but it is not sex.

        Tango is unique among all forms of dancing because it does not rely on patterns; it is a dance based on an understanding of the fundamentals of movement by two people: forward/backward/side steps, pivots, simple changes of weight and that most important fundamental of all, the pause.

        There is another saying, “the passion of tango is not in the movements, but rather, it is in the pauses.”

        I have found that the pause is one of the most difficult concepts to master. It is the absence of movement but it is full of intention. It is a moment, or several moments, frozen in time. It is two bodies joined together in an intense exchange of passion as an interpretation of the music and nothing else.

       That is how tango becomes something more than sex, because of the absence of sex in the pause.


Note: Check out my new book on Amazon: Fear of Intimacy and the Tango Cure.

Chapter 3: The Tango Embrace

Chapter Three

The Tango Embrace

                As a fledgling tanguero at practica, an extremely attractive tanguera confided in me that one of the men there had a super-duper embrace.

               “I just love (blank)’s embrace!” she exclaimed, loudly.

               She said this to help me understand there was something lacking in mine. She wasn’t trying to hurt my feelings but it stung all the same.

               There should be a college course on how to hold a woman. When a couple applies for a marriage license, the man should be handed an application form for the class. Only upon successful completion of the course can they be allowed to marry.  

               For me, steeling myself from a women’s sensuality was a big part of the problem I had with being in such an intimate position with a total stranger.  It was a constant battle to put away the infatuated little boy in me who kept taking over and immobilizing my brain. I needed to tap into my virile side: the former whitewater river guide, the father who had raised two children, the man who provided for them and protected them from harm.

               For three solid years, I worked on my embrace. It was difficult not to be overwhelmed by infatuation. Eventually, I was able to ignore a woman’s sensuality and focus on navigating. It turned out, this was half the problem; the other half was learning to relax. The more I relaxed, the more I began to notice that my partners were relaxing, too. 

               It was at this point that I realized tango was helping me overcome my problems with intimacy.

               Until this time, I eschewed all forms of physical contact unless it was with my wife or kids. I always attributed this to growing up in a large family and being packed, sardine-like, into our yellow, Rambler station wagon.

               My armchair psychiatrist friends always diagnosed my problem as homophobia. In a way, they might have been right. Homophobia might be a defensive instinct I developed during childhood. I can remember several attempts by older males to molest me but I always managed to escape.  

               Once I got the embrace down, tango became a universe and I was Captain Kirk on the Starship Enterprise, on a five year mission to seek out strange new worlds…and dance with their women.

               Before I mastered the embrace, nervous women always seemed to be crazy. Afterwards, they were just nervous and it became a game to wait them out, to see if they would calm down.  The rewards were often great but not in a sexual way, as I would have wanted as a young man.

               I guess that age and experience had led me to appreciate Sexual’s cousin, Sensual, a lot more. Maybe overcoming my fear of intimacy allowed me to see the world through a different set of eyes. Now, I want to be part of the solution and I find immense gratification for being the vehicle through which a woman discovers tango and, possibly, her own cure.   

 

               The tango embrace is begun by a man and a woman joining together at the heart. Their shoulders and arms are back, held without tension. Their hips are separated so that only their ribs are together. In this position, the woman is free to break away and so it must be all throughout the dance.

               Joined thus, each person is exposed to the other. Their health, anxiety and possibly even their thoughts are available for the other to access. It is this vulnerability that is the essence of tango, the secret ingredient, the net with which their hearts are captured.

               A man, attempting to move to the rhythms of tango music, is biologically affected by his efforts, a primal reaction caused by the proximity of the opposite sex. This, in turn, causes her to exhibit a physical response of her own. This is called chemistry. When combined with tango music, the chemical reactions can be quite exhilarating for the participants.

               I often feel foolish in my attempts to lead, yet I am frequently surprised to find the lady in my arms enjoying the results of my efforts. I think women take pleasure in a man’s embarrassment as long as he is engaged in an endeavor to please them.

               When I sense my partner’s enjoyment, I become more virile; my back straightens, my chest protrudes. I’ve noticed that the change in my posture is usually reciprocated with a delightful repositioning of the follower’s frame.

               The key factor in all this is the woman’s sense of freedom. To the observer, it might not appear that the lady is unencumbered. She is not concerned with her audience; she is focused only on the dance. What matters to her is that she feels like a partner, not a captive. She must be at liberty to express the music through her own movements.

               To complete the coupling, the man offers his left hand to the woman at a comfortable level for her to easily place her right hand on his. Her hand joins his, like a bird landing on a tree branch. The supple limb yields beneath the bird’s weight while still providing support.

               His right arm wraps around her back without entrapping her or pushing her off balance. Usually, his hand is placed underneath her right shoulder blade but anywhere is fine, as long as she is comfortable with it being there.

               I find it doesn’t matter how the woman positions her left arm around me, just as long as she keeps her diaphragm pressed to mine as best as she can. If I know that she can feel my intention, the direction in which I want her to go, then I am satisfied. 

               Now we are ready to move. Here is where all the time we spent practicing pays off. It is not easy to move in this position without knocking your partner off his/her balance. With my heart, I ask her to step backwards, sideways or towards me; I could also invite her to pivot or shift her weight to her other foot.

               Or I can do nothing and simply enjoy her embrace, the sound of the music, the feel of her touch and the smell of her hair, for this is tango and this is where the passion is expressed: in the pauses.

Fear of Intimacy and the Tango Cure is available on Amazon, just click this link. Reviews, good or bad, on Amazon and Goodreads would be greatly appreciated.

Sweet Young Thing

               “Men just want to dance with a sweet young thing,” is a phrase often spoken by women as they try to make sense of the intense emotions unleashed inside them on the road to becoming a tango dancer. I don’t know what those feelings are but I can tell you I have borne the brunt of many a storm let loose by extremely discouraged ladies attempting to vent, if not cope, with the situation.

               They say they are frustrated by their lack of dance invitations but I suspect there is something more than that.

               I never know what to say except that tango is rough on almost everybody who doesn’t immediately realize that peace of mind comes from confidence, which comes from competence, which is achieved through proper practice. To assimilate smoothly into the culture of this passionate dance, we must learn how to move on our own balance. 

               I am not going to write about balance because that subject has been beaten to death, hopefully, by every instructor you’ve ever met. I want to talk about the aforementioned idiom sweet young thing.

               I find it remarkable that I’ve heard that exact phrase uttered in conversations with women from the New York City to Tucson to Minneapolis. Normally, a colloquialism will morph in different regions of the country but not this one. I suspect it is a media-born expression that rides a wave created by a myriad of authors in a sea of women’s magazines.

               That saying seems to be chock full of jealousy but there is something hidden within those words that gives it staying power as it travels, unchanged, on the lips and in the minds of women around the country.

               At my ballroom dance practice, in Fargo, one of the ladies present was complaining about a dance with a tall, rude man whose “fly was undone and wore his breakfast on his sweater.”

               Eventually, in the gaggle of gals that sympathetically joined in, sweet young thing was again invoked.

               I looked into each of the faces of the women seated at the table and it occurred to me that a sweet young thing lived on inside every one of them! When they talked about her, they were speaking about the young girl they once used to be, not some hottie getting too much attention from the men at the gathering.

               When an older person dances with a person much younger than them, no matter that it is old man/young woman or mature woman/young man, a certain dynamic comes into effect. I can comment on the former because I have often been the aged male in the coupling.

               In this situation, I am infinitely patient and without demands. It happens naturally. I am happy just to be touching her and she can make no mistake as far as I am concerned.

               This is how every woman, young and old, wants to be treated when she is in the tango embrace. She needs to feel her partner appreciates her and is without demands.

               Once again, tango has shined a light on the greatest mystery of all, women, and illuminated another piece of the puzzle. The more I learn about them, the more I realize that there is to learn. 

               I doubt that one life is enough to see the whole picture. I wonder if men and women are not meant to spend eternity trying to figure each other out. I guess I'll find out in the next life, if there is one.

Fear of Intimacy and the Tango Cure, a book by perri iezzoni Part Two

Chapter Two

The Poison

               Like many milongueros, I consider myself one of the walking wounded. I was a straight ‘A’ student and a star athlete when I was very young.

               When I entered adolescence, I embarked on a series of poor decisions that led me down a very dark path until I became a father.

                Before I was ten years of age, I began working with my grandfather, Yanno, a Slovakian-American coal miner, born and raised in the coal towns of northeastern PA. I didn't work with him every day but whenever you worked with Yanno, you worked hard. He knew the meaning of the word ‘work’ and, by the end of the day, you did too.

               Yanno was a good provider. He was always helping out my mother and her eight kids. He wasn’t my mom’s real dad, he was her stepfather. Her real father was a union thug who skipped out on my grandmother and left her with three young children to fend for herself.

               That’s how Yanno came into our lives.

               Yanno wasn’t a bad man but he was involved in a lot of shady enterprises. I think that he honestly believed that he was doing the best he could for a situation that was beyond his control. I’ve often wondered if he thought that my mother couldn’t keep my dad from knocking her up. I think he felt that he could help out by teaching her kids to fend for themselves because we were going to grow up poor.

                Yanno had grown up in a time when child labor laws didn’t exist. He survived The Great Depression and many battles in the Pacific during World War II.

               His idea of what a child needs to learn and what was against the law were often one and the same.

               At the age of 14, I worked as a roofer’s assistant. This is not easily distinguished from the chores of a mule that has to carry heavy things, like stacks of shingles, up to high places. I worked throughout my high school years as a paperboy for the early edition of the local newspaper. I also worked on a milk truck for a year, back in the day when people still had milk delivered to their front porch.

               I didn’t really need the money but I soon found a place to spend it in the gambling rooms of a depressed coalmining town. I didn’t know it at the time but I had a gambling problem. I wasn’t able to quit until I was arrested in my parents’ living room when I was 16 years old. A friend of mine had stolen some money from a small general store and I had driven him there. He got caught and I drove away, not realizing the enormity of my offense.

               My father wasn’t around much while I was growing up. That’s because he was in the U.S. Army, fighting the Vietnam War. When he retired from the military, he took a job in New York City to support his children, most of who were in college.

               That day he came roaring into my life like a lion as I was remanded to the custody of my parents.

               My dad beat the shit out of me every day for two months; once in the morning and once at night. He even took off work for a month just to make sure I didn’t miss a whooping.

               My gambling problem was cured. If you don’t know what fathers are for, now you do: they are for keeping teenage boys out of jail.

               That’s life in Appalachia, that boom/bust area of the Appalachian Mountains where America grew up before it went off to fight World War II. And that is where I received the wounds that would stay with me for the rest of my life…until I discovered a dance called The Tango.

               A key figure in my intimacy problem is a woman I’ll call Lady X. She’s very attractive and is adored, I’m sure, by all the men in her town. Once, before a milonga, we got together for drinks, just to get to know each other better. It was a very platonic encounter that caused so many problems.

               I found her so alluring that I couldn’t think clearly when we danced. It wasn’t such a problem when I didn’t know her so well. Now that we’d shared an experience outside of tango, I couldn’t keep from imagining all the possible things we could share: rides, dinners….blankets?!!!

               I sent her an email in which I revealed that I found her very good-looking. After I hit send, I got scared that she might want to go out with me. I’d never be able to resist her if she gave me some encouragement.

               I wondered what it would mean if I could resist her.

               The next time I saw her it was difficult for me to ask her onto the floor.

               It was a good night for the women at the milonga: lots of guys. My friend was a hot commodity. All her partners were much better dancers than I am but she made it easy for me to ask her.

               We danced two tandas. I felt very exposed but I knew I had to get through this. I told her I felt awkward and she seemed to understand. I thought that solved the problem. On the second tanda, we moved together better but I was still not comfortable.

               I continued to worry that I would fall for her if she gave me the go ahead. I couldn’t believe that I really considered this a problem! I hadn’t had sex in ten years, I should have been ready to kill to be in the situation I was in but I wasn’t.

               Eventually, I developed a dance relationship with Lady X. I’d wished it was a sexual relationship but my fear of intimacy prevented me from getting too close to her. 

               She was very pretty and it was hard for me to get past that. I complimented her on her looks all the time. I was extremely infatuated with her and I felt like a little boy when I was with her.  

               What she wanted, I later found, was to dance with a man. In order to deal effectively with her, I found that I had to man up, or be more virile.

               Our ability to become more virile is what makes us valuable as leaders. When we do this, the woman responds instinctively. It is like a secret code that unlocks a safe within her DNA.  

               As always, a little voice in my head tried to tempt me into blaming her but I didn’t bite.       

               Manning up sucks. If it were up to me, I’d rather be the little boy, hopelessly infatuated and seeing only hearts when I look at her. 

               I didn’t want to do it but I did. Once I stopped complimenting her all the time and stopped talking to her altogether, I was able to focus.

               Once I started focusing, something about her changed; something about us changed. I sensed that sex was now a possibility.

               Again, my fear of intimacy kicked in big time and I found it extremely annoying.

               It was at this point that I admitted to myself that I had a problem. I had to solve it, once and for all, or risk becoming a tango dancing monk. I wasn’t sure if such a religious order existed and I didn’t want to find out.

               Women in their twenties often complain that the older men won't dance with them. Being in the latter group, I know this to be true. I often spy young tangueras displaying all the signs of women looking to be asked to dance: sitting on the edge of the chair, looking around wide-eyed, disengaged from conversations and I am not inclined to invite them onto the dance floor.
               Young women lack a certain type of emotional energy that is found in abundance in a more mature woman. This energy is like a battery; a nuclear generator might be a better analogy.
               I believe this energy has something to do with stress. It is created by the amount of responsibilities a person must bear, something a younger person usually lacks. 
               This energy is one of the many reasons that tango is so addictive.

               The essence of tango is in the connection between the two dancers. When we make that connection, our stress, or this energy, or whatever you want to call it, is shared by our partners. When that happens, I can feel it flowing into me, not in a rush but slow, like an intravenous drip during the span of a tanda.

               Sharing in our partner's emotional burden of responsibilities is one of the things that keep us coming back to tango.  It's kind of like therapy.
               I’m certain most tangueras are not aware of the existence of this energy. I guess it is the source of their own poison that drives them to tango for the cure. 

My book is on sale at amazon.com

Missing Lapushka, a poem

Missing Lapushka

Where are you now,

My little Russian Tanguera?

How I miss my chances to make you smile,

Your perfectly calibrated molinete,

Our efforts to make this dance work...

Together.

More than anything,

I miss the love that is in your heart,

Love that could melt snow,

Love that could have pity

For a man like me,

The straggler, the loner,

The broken daddy...

The tango dancer:-)