Mambo Mania

My mother, brother, his partner, and I are standing in the hallway outside my dad’s apartment looking at a plaque saying, “No Dancing in Shared Spaces.” It seems like something out of Footloose, but there’s a good reason for it. My dad has a latin dancing problem. He does it non-stop, and it’s freaking people out. We’re here for an intervention—my idea after six months of this shit—but now I’m not so sure it’s a good idea.

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I use my spare key to let us in. It’s Wednesday evening, so he’s currently out at his sixth samba class of the week. We set up the picnic chairs we’ve brought with us in the middle of what used to be a normal studio apartment. He’s converted it into a dance studio: dark wood floors, mirrors on all the walls, balance bars, huge speakers, and virtually no furniture. He has a Murphy bed, but it’s folded up into one of the mirrored panels right now.

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My family chit chat. They don’t see my dad much and aren’t too fussed about the situation; they only came because I asked. But my dad and I are closer. He’s my best friend, and he’s done everything for me: indulged me in my hobbies, hung out with me when I had no friends, paid for my school, paid for my rehab, and let me live with him until I was 30. I don’t feel like I have the right to disagree with him after all that.

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It’s just, it’s not only a little bit of dancing. It’s all the time, and it’s everywhere. He lost his new dream job as a creative director at a big ad agency because he insisted on doing the salsa with clients. People stare at him on the streets because he’ll only get around by marching the paso doble. His tennis-obsessed girlfriend broke up with him because he tried to get her to do the bachata between points when they played doubles. But still, what right do I have to tell him to stop?

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Eventually we hear him marching in the hallway, disobeying the plaque. Seconds later, he slams violently into his front door (I should mention that despite the amount my father dances, he’s not actually very good at it). I’m nervous, but then the door swings open, and my dad—British, Oxford-educated, bald, and as white as Prince Phillip (dead or alive)—is wearing Al Capone-style shoes, skin tight pin-striped trousers, and a ruffled red satin shirt unbuttoned down to his belly button. Fuck it. We’re doing this.

 

He comes into the room, nursing his bruised shoulder but still swivelling his hips to whatever’s blasting through his earbuds. He spots us and takes out the buds. “Oh, I’m glad you’re here! Everybody get up; move the chairs. Nicola [my mother], come to me; Charlie [my brother], switch the stereo to Bumba rumba; Sally [Charlie’s partner], accompany on the maracas; Henry, take note.” My dad starts spinning his way into the centre of the room, sweeping one leg out in typical tango fashion. “Actually, Henry, do a cha-cha-cha while you’re watching—maybe a solo salsa if you prefer, but your Nikes are screaming cha-cha-cha to me.”

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“Dad, stop,” I say sheepishly as he steps back and forth churning his arms around like a locomotive. “We’re here for an intervention.”

 

“For what? For who?” he says, continuing to dance. “Come on everyone, get moving. You know the rule, if you’re not part of the dance you have to leave.”

 

“For your dancing. You have a problem,” I say—again, sheepishly.

 

“If by ‘problem’ you mean I haven’t figured out how to dance while sleeping, then you have a point. Otherwise, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

 

“Dad, please stop dancing.” He’s now dancing in a solo conga line. “You do nothing but dance. You have a serious problem. I’m worried.”

 

“I don’t have a problem with dancing. Sounds like you might have a dancing problem. May I suggest dancing to solve it? Helps me figure things out.”

 

“Dad! There’s no fucking music playing! Stop dancing!” I say, breaking sooner than I’d expected.

 

“The drums never stop in here,” he says, rhythmically pointing to his head and slowly spinning around.

 

I look at my family for support but then realize they haven’t actually seen my dad in a couple of months and aren’t familiar with just how bad this has gotten. They stare in amazement/disbelief.

 

“How are you going to keep living like this? You lost your job,” I continue.

 

“People lose their jobs all the time,” he says, clapping his hands by the right side of his head while stomping his left foot—his downstairs neighbours complain frequently.

 

“Not for dancing!”

 

“It probably happens more than you think,” he says.

 

He starts seductively shuffling towards my mother—from whom he has been divorced for seven years. “Come on, Nicola, you look like you could use a dollop of salsa!” He holds one hand out in place for my mother to take—which she doesn’t—while the rest of him continues to slide from side to side. “You used to complain I didn’t dance enough when we were married.”

 

“At weddings, dear,” says my mother. “Not at home or the grocery store.”

 

“Seems like an arbitrary distinction to me,” he says, keeping his hand outstretched to her.

 

After a minute of my mother rejecting him, he starts gliding around the room for the next ten minutes trying in turn to get the rest of us to dance. He doesn’t slow down for one second or seem to be bothered by us all turning him down. If I’m being honest, his stamina is impressive if not concerning. He’s lost a lot of weight since this all begun. Sometimes I think he burns more calories than he takes in while eating because he insists on continuing to dance. He sort of jiggles his ass up and down in rhythm to his chewing.

 

It takes a while, but I seem to get him to admit that what he’s doing isn’t normal. But he quite rightly argues back that because something isn’t normal doesn’t make it wrong and that society only moves forward when visionaries start behaving unusually. My dad is extremely intelligent, very good at debating, and very pig headed. Trying to convince him to change his mind when he’s acting normal is hard enough.

 

But there used to be a stability in his stubbornness. It’s tough when someone is crazy and stubborn. But until this (episode?), he was very stubborn and very sane. My brother and I as kids thought it would be funny to pretend our dad was insanely obsessed with pigs and would buy him pig toys every birthday. My dad played along, but that was as close to crazy as he ever got. He was also kind of emotionless, which bothered by mother and brother, but was perfect for me because I have enough emotions for two people. My father had room to help me with all the problems that come from a surplus of emotions. But dancing has closed him off from me.

 

For a second, he seems to notice the helplessness on my face. He sweeps towards me in two wide ballroom spins. “Henry, I am not the first person who has succumbed to the rhythm. It comes for us all someday.” He pauses. “One day, it will come for you too,” he says sincerely, earnestly, and almost as though he was saying something terribly meaningful. But the fact he’s shimmying his bare, hairy 63 year-old chest at me while he’s saying it belies the fact that he really is just talking about some sort of dancing mania.

 

“Edwin, can you tell us why you feel the need to keep dancing?” asks my mother. I had wondered about this briefly myself. What makes a fairly and solidly stable person start latin dancing every second he’s awake? I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure nobody has ever had to ask that before, so I didn’t bother Googling it.

 

“Why did Picasso paint?” he replies.

 

“When my uncle got let go from his job he got super into golf,” says Sally. “Not quite as into it as this though.” Nothing ostensibly bad had happened to my dad that would explain him snapping like this (he’s now snapping his fingers in a flurry while gliding around). My dad’s life was going really well, dream job, five years with his girlfriend—those things ended because of his dancing.

 

“Are you worried about getting old, dad?” asks my brother. My mother, 6 years older than my dad, looks affronted by the question. But aging being something that bothers my dad really doesn’t suit his style.

 

“Not at all. Dancing keeps me young,” he says, now doing something that looks like erotic fencing: lots of jabbing and thrusting. The room looks like a beginners fencing class with his many reflections.

 

“Was the new job too hard?” asks my mother. My father ignores the question and continues jabbing. After a pause I repeat the question.

 

“Of course not,” he says, more tersely than I think he meant to. “There’s just not enough dancing in advertising these days—if you know what I mean.” Literally. He means literally I think as he begins rhythmically fighting an imaginary bull. I don’t really think it’s the job. My dad’s does well under pressure. I don’t know what I think the reason behind this is, and to be honest, I gave up thinking about it pretty quickly. I’m a believer in cognitive behavioural therapy; focus on the solution, not the cause. I’ve never thought about why I have so much anxiety. The reasons people come up with for illnesses are bullshit and don’t help half the time anyway.

 

“Was it not as good as you thought it would be?” asks Sally.

 

“Forget the job,” he says. “I was born to be a dancer!”

 

“How were things going with Kuniko?” asks my brother.

 

“Things were great until I realized she couldn’t handle the passion!” He thrusts particularly hard as he says “passion!” I talk a lot about my relationships—all failed—with my dad, but he never brings up his.

 

“How’s your health?” asks my mother.

 

“Fine. How’s yours?” He begins a cha cha cha, which, if you don’t know, is the stereotypical latin dance you see where people step back and forth and side to side while shifting their hips from left and right. I remember when my dad had a hernia. He didn’t let me know about it until the day before his operation because he needed me to pick him up afterwards, which makes me think if there is something wrong with his health, he’s not going to say it in front of me.

 

His cha-cha-cha is gradually getting faster, and he’s starting to breathe more heavily. Like I said, his stamina has been impressive—unbelievable really—throughout this. This is the first time I’ve seen him show signs of fatigue.

 

“Dad, is there something wrong with your health?” I ask. But he just keeps getting faster and faster—and breathing deeper and deeper. “Dad! What’s wrong?” We all realize this is the reason. We keep asking him, but he just gets faster and faster and acts like he doesn’t even see us anymore. I try to restrain him, but he spins on a dime and knocks me back before recommencing his cha cha cha. The intensity radiating off of him makes us realize talking isn’t going to help anymore. We just watch him increase his speed until eventually he collapses.

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We take him to the emergency room where a doctor diagnoses him with Rhythmic Avoidance Disorder—an extremely rare anxiety disorder—which we're told Dick Cheney is supposed to have. Apparently when Cheney isn’t in the public eye he’s constantly doing the Macarena.

 

Anyway, they keep my dad in the psych ward for a couple of weeks. On my visits he seems to dance a little less each time. He lets me know he’s slowly losing his sight and he was panicking that his career was over and Kuniko would leave him when he couldn’t play tennis anymore. Dancing made him forget about those things, and when they eventually happened, he was so deep into the mania he just danced progressively harder to escape it all. I get that—I’m constantly jumping from one thing to the next to avoid my anxiety: obsessive-compulsions, then perfectionism, then alcoholism, then workaholism. But my dad is sharper than I am; I see him fixing the crazy instead of just transforming it.

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I go down to Seattle for a couple of weeks after he’s released from the psych ward to just forget about this shit. When I come back to Vancouver, I go to his apartment to check on him. As I get off the elevator on his floor, there’s a strong smell of feces throughout the hallway. And there’s new plaque on the wall saying, “Pigs Must Be Leashed In Public Spaces”.