Remembering The Tango

There comes a point in a man’s life where he realizes that most of his life is memories. Everyone knows stories about people who reach that point and decide to choose when they die rather than wait for the universe to decide for them.

For me, two of the most interesting are Sylvia Plath, who, just months before I was born, decided at age thirty that life had nothing more to offer her. When you turn sixty, thirty seems remarkably young. I’ll never understand how Plath made this decision with a loving husband, vast amounts of untapped talent, and two beautiful children. Suffering from Major Depression most of her life, her doctors prescribed Monoamine oxidase inhibitor, a fairly new drug that had recently begun being used for suicide risks. It didn’t work.

Two years before I was born, Ernest Hemmingway, who fought in three wars, rode with bulls and befriended matadores, bloodied the face of his best friends in boxing matches, had drinks named for him in Paris, wrote some of America’s most famous books, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, friend and rival of William Faulkner, used his favorite shotgun to “quite deliberately” end his own life.

Checked into the hospital under his wife’s name to avoid publicity, doctors tried valiantly to save Pappa. They gave him three rounds of shock therapy and prescribed massive amounts of Ritalin, a drug often used to treat ADHD, a disorder I have and Hemingway also very likely had. However, it manifested very differently in him. Of his treatments, he said, “What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient.”

Sometimes, when I write about suicide, I’m accused of romanticizing it. That’s not my intention. My intention is to understand it and, at the same time, avoid making those who suffer from it seem weak or broken. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be as weak and broken as Plath or Hemmingway.

I’ll also get questions from those who still love me about “Are you ok?” I am ok. I’m not currently depressed, even though this accursed Mississippi heat threatens to ruin my daylight adventures. I think I’ve witnessed too many suicides to ever be its victim—although it took me several minutes to decide whether “victim” was the word I wanted to use.

Last night, I watched “Scent of a Woman” with Al Pacino and a very young Chris O'Donnell, who very nearly destroyed his promising career playing Robin in the final Warner Brother’s Timothy Burton Batman cycle of movies.

Charlie Simms uses a need and a merit-based scholarship to attend the Baird School. It is a fictional institution modeled after a half dozen East Coast liberal arts boys’ prep schools and portrayed by Princeton University and the Emma Willard School for girls. While his friends plan to spend Thanksgiving at an expensive Vermont Ski Lodge, Simms responds to an ad for a weekend job house sitting and attending to an “elderly invalid” to make enough money to fly home for Christmas break.

Phillip Seymore Hoffman plays a young boy who represents values opposite of Simms. He’s wealthy, weak, and selfish. Hoffman would go on in life to win both Academy and Golden Globe awards for his acting. His death at forty-six was ruled an accident, but he had been injecting himself with heroin, cocaine, benzodiazepines, and amphetamine in large doses on the day he died, so I’m not at all convinced it was an accident.

The “elderly invalid” Charlie is hired to watch retired is Lt. Col. Frank Slade. Slade led young men to their deaths in Vietnam and rode out the end of the '60s as an aide-de-camp for Lyndon B. Johnson. Turning sixty, Slade loses his eyesight due to an unfortunate accident while juggling hand grenades.

Slade’s niece hires Charlie to watch over him while she and her husband drive upstate to visit inlaws. She believes he will listen to the television and drink. With his family gone, Slade tells Charlie to pack his bag, including his dress blues and colonel’s bars. They’re going to Manhattan.

Checked into the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Slade tells Charlie that his plan is to have the finest meal New York has to offer, sleep with a beautiful woman, and blow his brains out with his .45 sidearm. Thus ending his life, which had reached a point of being mostly memory.

The point of the film is that Slade teaches seventeen-year-old Charlie how to live, and Charlie teaches Slade why to live. It was directed by Martin Brest, who I was never particularly impressed with. “Scent of a Woman” is by far his best work.

It was written by Bo Goldman, a Jewish writer and regular collaborator of Milos Foreman, and responsible for some of the most important films of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, Including “One Flew Over The CooCoo’s Nest,” “Melvin and Howard,” “The Rose,” and co-wrote “Ragtime.” He was also famous for getting paid massive amounts of money to write films that were never made, including Universal Studio’s “The Legend of King Kong” and “The Chorus Line.”

One of the film's principal themes is Col. Slade teaching seventeen-year-old Charlie not only why but also how to love women. Goldman can sometimes write very movement and visually-oriented scenes. Among his most famous involved Col. Slade smelling the soap of a beautiful English woman sitting a few tables away from his last meal on earth. Slade asks Charlie if she’s beautiful. She is.

Realizing she’s sitting alone, Slade asks Charlie to guide him to her table. Her name is Donna, and she’s alone because her fiance is late. Slade asks Donna (played by Gabrielle Anwar) if she would like to tango. She says she's afraid. He asks her, “Afraid of what,” and she says she’s afraid of making a mistake. Slade tells her that, unlike life, there are no mistakes in Tango. Then he and Donna dance in one of cinema’s most famous dance sequences to Por Una Cabeza, a tango by Carlos Gardel.

Once upon a time, I took lessons in Tango, Waltz, and Foxtrot. They say that big men can be very good dancers. I don’t know if that’s true, but I learned to carry a woman around the dance floor in ways that didn’t involve actually lifting her up, holding a conversation—or not, depending on the moment.

Walt Disney made a career by creating animated features based on children’s books or fairytales. When he died, his tiny studio, now one of the largest and most powerful in the movie business, lost its way of telling stories with animated characters. Having given up on animated films for a while, the studio made a triumphant return with 1989’s The Little Mermaid, based on the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale.

Under the gun to repeat one of their first successes in a long time, Disney turned to an improbable source for their next film: Shakespeare. When I read that their next animated feature, “The Lion King,” was based on “Hamlet,” I laughed a little. “Surely not,” I thought.

Hamlet is the story of a prince who loses his father, the king, while his shoulders are still too young to bear the burden of his birth. Hamlet questions the meaning of life and the value of his own existence and ends up killing or causing the death of everyone, including his lover, his mother, his stepfather (and uncle), his only friends, and himself. It's hardly the sort of material you usually see in a Disney feature.

I was twenty-nine when my father died. What he knew, that not even my mother knew, was that for three years, he and I had been making plans for me to leave Mississippi and go somewhere where I might find and develop my own talents, not try to copy his.

A few months after my father died, Frank Day, the president of Trustmark, and Robert Wingate, my father’s closest cousin and friend, took me to lunch at the University Club to tell me that I was too young to assume my father’s position at Mississippi School Supply. I think they expected me to be hurt and disappointed, hence the expensive meal and good cigars. I wasn’t. I was relieved. Trying to live my father’s life would have meant never learning to live my own.

When “The Lion King” came to Jackson, I asked Lance Goss if he wanted to go. “I don’t care for cartoons, " he said. I asked a young woman if she cared for dinner and a movie. Some seven years my junior, she said she wasn’t accustomed to dates where she didn’t have to pay for dinner. Although she was very good company, it would be a few more years before I was willing to see the same person more than twice.

When it got to the part about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, The Lion King took a sharp turn away from its source material. The writers at Disney wisely cooked up a happy ending to Hamlet, something nobody had ever attempted before. If they kept the original ending, Fox would have been the one to buy Disney, not the other way around.

Robert Guillaume, famous for playing Benson on television, played Rafiki, a mandril mystic. Simba, nee Hamlet, questions his existence, his life, his choices, and what, if any, future he has, and Rafiki tells him that his father is still alive. Rafiki leads a confused Simba to still water to consider his reflection, where Simba has a vision of his father saying, “Remember who you are.”

While I’ve never had a vision of my dead father, there have been many people who whispered in my ear, “Remember who you are,” in my many journeys to discover what my life meant.

Like Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, there are days when I feel like all that’s left of my life is memories, and the only thing I can still feel is the scent of a woman. Unlike life, there are no mistakes in tango; It’s simple. That’s what makes the tango so great. If you make a mistake, get all tangled up, just tango on.”

Memories are the past, but the past is never the end. The end is the end. The future is memories that have yet to be made. I’ll always ponder why Poppa Hemmingway, Sylvia Plath, and Philip Seymore Hoffman chose not to carry on. Maybe they didn’t know how to tango.