My Time as a Human

A friend was talking in wonder about a guy he knew who always seemed to stumble into adventure. My friend went on in amazement about how this person had wandered into a port in Chile and was suddenly on a boat sailing around the world. “I don’t know how these people do it,” he said. Then he stopped and turned to me. “What am I saying? You know what I’m talking about. You’re one of those people!”

Most people think there’s nothing magic about statistics, but I love to experience math that way. Your odds of meeting someone who wants to give you their car because they won’t need it for the next year are exactly zero if you sit at home. I spend, granted, too much time socializing but this means that my social network is large enough that when I need a toaster, the odds are pretty good that I’m connected to someone out there who just realized they have an extra toaster and would love to see it getting use. The odds, to an outsider, look like magic when I speak the words, “I need a toaster” and a new toaster appears on my counter.

Now it turns out that I’m actually a really shy person. (No, no one else believes that either.) But I learned a trick years ago that helped get me into the good kind of trouble by upping the odds that I’d be near it. I call it “jumping off cliffs”. After a couple of simple recent cliff jumps, small social risks, I suddenly found myself spending five days hugging dozens of women in slow motion as a nonverbal conversation about music.

First, the cliff. When I was in Jr. High School I learned a trick. If I tried to stand in front of a phone, imagine the call I was about to make to a cute girl, and then force my arm to pick up the phone and dial, nothing happened. Nothing happened for a long time and I felt miserable throughout every one of those terrifying minutes. I learned instead to walk away and take on a project or do something else until I’d completely forgotten about the girl and the phone. The moment that thought re-entered my head, the moment I realized I’d forgotten, I immediately threw myself off of a cliff. I grabbed the phone and before I was aware of what was happening, it was ringing and someone was about to answer. I was falling. No time to think about jumping, it had already happened and now I was going to have to respond! Sure, I blundered, said moronic things, pissed people off, and made them laugh. But if I had simply sat at the cliff’s edge absolutely nothing would have happened. And here’s the best part. This type of risk, and almost all social risks, are metaphorical cliffs. No one will die. What’s the worst that can happen compared to that?

A little more than a year ago I went out a cafe to meet an old friend, Margaret Heyn. I should probably have been working, but I don’t get to see her very often now that she lives in San Antonio so I skipped out. She had a friend along and after some chatter they tried to convince me to, again, skip out on even more work and go Tango dancing with them. As it turns out, tango dancing requires a fair bit of patience and has a steep learning curve, especially for leads. I had tried a few times years ago to learn this dance with Margaret and was frustrated. Worse, they weren’t asking me to come to a class. They were asking me to come to a full on dance space full of people moving smoothly and elegantly around a tiny room, step into this densely packed sea of movement with a woman in my arms, and somehow manage to stumble around without tripping her, running into anyone else, falling onto anyone, or generally being the single cause of a complete disaster. I can tell you from experience that, starting out, this is nearly impossible. In a notable night from my past I once lead a woman into having her foot stabbed by a high heel. I helped her limp off of the floor and swore never to dance again.

“We’ll give you a quick lesson in the parking lot”, Marg promised. The cliff loomed. Here was my chance to look like a complete idiot in front of someone I’d just met and potentially injure countless innocent dancers. Social death. I thought about it, made myself stop, and threw myself off. Sarah Stayer, Margaret’s friend that I met that night, won a free month of tango lessons that evening and handed them to me on the spot. We dated for the next year.

A year later I found myself in Chicago and wanting some kind of release. I leapt off of a few more cliffs. I sent messages to a series of people online who mentioned tango and Chicago in their facebook profiles. I drove an hour and a half into the city, to a place I’d never been, to try to dance with total strangers. I was still, essentially, a beginning tango dancer. There I had a fifteen minute conversation with Carolin Colon and Galina Obushinskaya after dancing with them. Each invitation to dance was another little cliff, the dance and conversation happening in free fall.

Months later I decided, against sound financial judgement, to splurge on a tango festival that happened to be in Chicago. I contacted Carolin out of the blue. I hadn’t spoken to her since our fifteen minute interaction months before. She, in turn, took a social risk and immediately offered to have me sleep on her couch.

It turned out that Carolin and her housemate had a cat, so propelled by my sneezes we split for a hotel room at the event, which lead to meeting more people who wanted a place to crash (when the dances ended at 5:00am) and suddenly I found myself in a nice hotel room in Chicago with Carolin, Galina, Viktoriya Pantaleeva and Margaret (who coincidentally happened to come to the same event!) laughing, drinking wine, swapping stories and having the time of our lives. New friends. New experiences.

So start your cliff jumping now. No one will die. And by upping the odds, you just may find yourself in a hot tub full of world renown tango dancers. (Er, that happened later.)

As always, click photos to visit photographer’s site

The beautiful Taiwanese stranger across the room turned to find my gaze, nodded ever so slightly, and rose from her chair to slowly walk towards me. As my feet touched the wooden floor, I let them take time to connect with it, feel it. We stood together now; the floor beneath me, the woman before me, and the music surrounding us. I let the rhythm begin to move me, ever so slightly. I stepped closer, until I could feel her, and raised my arm to offer the embrace. She placed her soft hand gently into mine. I encircling her body. We breathed together deeply, slowly, several times as we both embraced the floor, the music, and each other. At last, with one powerful step, we moved forward as one. This is the Tango.

A woman approached me during one of the daily workshops at this last week’s Chicago Tango Week. “I just have to tell you… I was so moved last night… it was just so beautiful… watching you and your wife dance…” I looked at her puzzled. “Your girlfriend..?” My head tilted to the side. “Your..? Wow… it was so beautiful.”

I still have no idea who she might have meant, because that is how incredible a tango connection can be. There are so many wonderful people and moving dances every night at a Tango festival. The daily stream of workshops were followed by dances stretching until 5:00 AM and as we immersed together in this world we grew ever more attuned to the music, the dance, and each other.

The peak experiences have many flavors. During one very quick style of Tango, called the Milonga, Galina Obushinskaya and I risked the breakneck pace and found a sudden exhilarating connection that took us shooting across the room. Later I had a slow, very simple, very connected dance that melted through each movement. At one point I somehow managed to dance with someone far more talented than I deserved and we hit a Nuevo Tango Tanda, a series of dances to modern interpretations of the music, and I had the chance to fly with creative improvisation. She was so incredibly responsive and equally playful that it was like suddenly finding myself doing tricks in an fighter jet. When it came to a close I could barely thank her I was so high and shaking and I swooned off the floor blushing, stumbling and giggling like a little girl for the next half hour, hugging my friends and grinning like an idiot. It was beautiful.

As with the Tango experiences, the dancers, too, came in many flavors. China. Bulgaria. France. Taiwan. Japan. Germany. Canada. Russia. So few people spoke English as their first language, and as Tango comes from Argentina, Spanish was the secret handshake of our underground society.

Ours was just one event taking place at the huge hotel, and as I passed one older man in the hallway, he asked me, “Como esta?” I grinned and replied, “bien, gracias”, knowing that we had just confirmed each other as part of the same tribe, the same enthusiastic group of people carrying bags of expensive shoes as we walked around the hotel in our socks. The same people who hadn’t slept for days and couldn’t wait to feel the floor again. The same people willing to fumble through awkward new movements until they became smooth. Lovers of the dance called Tango.

When I was born in Hamburg, Germany my dad used an all mechanical Nikon camera to scoop up the light bouncing off of my pink baby flesh, new to the world, and raced home. He returned to the hospital with printed photographs, and mailed copies to a slew of excited relatives around the world. The image traveled via an ancient form of internet powered by a rusting Fiat Spyder and a series of postal employee handoffs. It was brought to life by my dad’s skills with a series of chemicals, tanks, special papers and something called an enlarger: a long-necked metal bird who’s eye looked ever downward. It waited patiently to imprint the next invisible image, the paper’s secrets only unveiled later as they slowly emerged beneath a clear chemical bath in the dim red light in a process that remained forever magical. My father stood before me now, holding that magical bird by the throat, saying, “I don’t know who would even want this stuff any more”.

He had only been back from the hospital for a few days, and I worried about the way he was exerting himself as he yanked out drawers and boxes. Days ago he hadn’t been able to stand on his own. No matter how skilled the doctors that had rerouted and repackaged his heart, his body had, in effect, just been hit by a mac truck. But my genetic code is half his and so he couldn’t handle inaction any more than I can. The time of film photography had passed and now that I was back in town it was time to tear apart the old dark room.

My parents designed and built our house to have, as a central component, a dark room for printing and developing our own photos. It had a water supply, drainage, and counter space for all of the baths. Strips of drying developed film hung from the ceiling: long black tape filled with tiny images of people in reverse black and white. There was, as in nearly every room in the house, an old stereo system playing classical music. Those old systems with their already obsolete 8-track tape decks still had radios that were “perfectly good” and never cost more than five dollars. When developing film, the room had to be completely dark and so the howling of a tenor opera singer filled the space left vacant by light. I remember feeling through the process, carefully loading the film strip onto the spool and into the stainless steel canister, slipping it through my fingers to be sure I could keep track of it, those voices ringing through my head and keeping me company.

“I think your mother has a piano student who is taking photography. We can see if she wants anything before we just dump it at the Goodwill.”

In the first house I remember as a child, in West Chicago, I helped my dad tape black plastic over the windows in the one tiny bathroom. We broke apart hand-rolled film spools and developed them on top of the back of the toilet. I was terrified to handle this mysterious material that could be destroyed by the touch of light or my fingers, but he made me struggle through the process, insisting that I learn by trying. He produced endless pictures of my sisters and I, large black and white images including one of myself with a mop of home cut hair covered by a crushed felt cowboy hat. That particular image grew and changed with me over time. At first it was fascinating, then embarrassing, and at last adorable as I grew older.

“These are some pretty nice lenses.”

In Jr. High I produced my first monster movie made entirely of still images. It was really more of a comic book. I rolled my own film, built a structure out of cool-whip containers and lego people, and had a dinosaur-like creature arrive to destroy the whole thing piece by piece. I used a classic dark room trick, and by waving a cutout piece of paper over the image as the enlarger projected it into the waiting paper below, I created the creature’s fiery breath that set the raised roadway full of matchbox cars ablaze. I called the creature Schalk, an old German world I found in a German/English dictionary that meant, “trickster”. The book was a school project, and so the deadline had me covered in chemicals, alone in that dark room, for days. At last I crawled upstairs to rejoin my sisters and sat exhausted holding my dry, cracked hands. For years afterwards, as I walked through the halls at school, I would hear the both taunting and endearing mock cries of terror, “Schalk! Schalk!”

“Here, just throw all of these pieces and the chemicals in a box and leave them at the bottom of the stairs. At least we should keep them together.”

I started picking out and sorting old cameras, with their black leather covers and old metal bodies, into a box. They don’t make anything out of metal any more.

“OK, I have to go lay down.”

My dad headed upstairs to sleep and I continued placing the lenses, filters and paper together in low cardboard boxes for the last time. I grouping them carefully, perhaps just to honor them. Perhaps just in case there was some last bit of use in them, one last person who still loved the feel of doing things by hand, of seeing images grow like blooming flowers in a watery bed, who wanted to feel the touch of the slippery surface when moving the print from one bath to the next, who loved the sound of the timer humming as its hand swept slowly back towards its place, the image held glowing before them until, with a click, it vanished again into darkness.

For this round, the only one I’ll remember, I live in a poet’s body. Despite my early aims towards science my brain spins wildly in all directions like an electron cloud, at any moment my point at best a probability. My feet long to feel the earth, and are cut for it, only to return again to draw new patterns of scars. My heart sends me lunging in odd directions until it finds something that will crack it. My stomach writhes and turns and my moving muscles burn as I try to walk it off through thin woods, over muddy waters, past bright green poison ivy. I should be at work right now. Some job, earning money, but instead I’m wrestling with my poet body, striving to find a hold that will keep me in check long enough to squeeze until a few sweaty drops of beauty fall onto a page or evaporate into waves that gently move eardrums and hearts. The struggle ends, little better than its start. I emerge hungry and exhausted and my society chides me for having wasted time, threatens not to feed me, and then places more bright lights and sharp stones in my path to send me off into the woods again.

Epilogue:

Returning up the path, I walk slowly at the center of a stream of joggers with their dog entourages. I’m sweeping a banana through the air, idly practicing knife fighting techniques learned while making a training video with an old Cuban man years ago. Somewhere at the tip of a still hidden grin, my philosopher’s sense of humor begins to twinkle faintly. Somewhere just behind me, the three law students that just ran past make jungle noises.

Also:

It’s easy to feel the great depth of life after falling into a dark well.
Don’t forget that, all along your journey, the sky above was infinitely vast.