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. 

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