Shammadamma.

I better have credibility here since I just gave you a link to the ultimate man movie, Rush. My wife showed me the video above a few years ago after I trashed coverage of a disastrous Olympic ice dancing competition that featured lots of crashing and pure athletic failure. Like many an American male, I had always viewed figure skating as a weird hybrid of sport and corrupt judging, something to be accommodated to womenfolk with few dividends but the occasional and always abbreviated upskirt shot. If you don’t watch you feel disloyal. If you do watch you feel kind of creepy. Why we tend to laugh and turn away.

But this video proved me wrong. Ice dancing is supposed to be the feyest of even figure skating events. Which were bad enough as it is. Thick-thighed cows thundering through their jumps. Ambitious non-hockey skater men ritually crashing on their attempts at the elusive quadruple while retired male competitors in the commentary booth ooh and ah about their arm movements. Pairs skaters who are mysteriously undistracted by having to hold their partners aloft with a hand firmly clamped on their pubic bones. The dancers, on the other hand, are just flouncing around the ice. Even Dick Button finds it boring, unimpressed by ‘the twizzle.’I think it makes all men uncomfortable. What is this ‘sport’ all about?

It’s about this. Waiting for the incredibly rare moments when all the competitive ambiance and political judging fades out of the picture and magic is allowed to bloom. When I saw this video, I had an immediate narcissistic thought: “This is the Shuteye Train on ice. Unless it’s a ballet of the torrid unrequited love between Johnny Dodge and Alice Hate.” Carmina Burana was always the theme song of the punks of South Street.

I’m thinking most men have an equivalent analogous drama in their lives. Sometimes real life does approach poetry. Why there is poetry. Why there is dance. Why there is ice dancing too. Mostly, we hunt in vain for a moment of connection. Sometimes there is a lightning bolt that tells us, “Oh yeah. This has happened in my heart and my soul.”

I’ll let my wife fill in the backstory of the amazing performance above. Lightning brief but electrifying. Deny it at the risk of your own couch-bound soul.

“Marina Anissina was a Russian Ice Dance skater who eventually paired with Frenchman Gwendal Peizerat to skate for France. How that happened is a soap opera in its own right. Together they raised Ice Dancing to a level not seen before or since. Their performances are athletic, artistic, and completely compelling.”

Early in her career, Anissina competed with Sergei Sakhnovski, representing the Soviet Union. Following that partnership, she teamed up with Ilia Averbukh. They represented the Soviet Union and, after that country’s dissolution, Russia. They were the 1990 and 1992 World Junior Champions. Their partnership ended at the end of the 1991–92 season;[5] Averbukh decided to leave Anissina to skate with Irina Lobacheva with whom he had fallen in love.

Russia at the time had a number of top ice dancing teams and was not especially concerned with helping Anissina find a new partner. She and her mother studied videotapes of international competitions and selected Gwendal Peizerat and Victor Kraatz. Anissina sent letters to both but the one to Kraatz did not reach him. Peizerat did not respond immediately but when his partnership with Marina Morel fell apart, he contacted Anissina. She arrived in Lyon, France, in February 1993, declaring her goal of becoming World and Olympic champion. She wanted to bring Peizerat back to Russia with her but his family was opposed so she settled in France. She focused intensely on skating and insisted her partner, who was dividing his time between skating and his education, be equally focused on their career. Their first year together was difficult with major quarrels and they came close to splitting up. Nevertheless, their coach Muriel Boucher-Zazoui immediately felt it was a promising partnership, saying “They are like fire and ice”.

“Preceded by the great Torville and Dean of Great Britain, who were the first to shake up the skating world, Anissina and Peizerat built unparalleled performances of perfection,” my wife concluded.

What she doesn’t tell you. She has an encyclopedic memory of figure skating competitions. She knows all the great Russians because she is a student of Russian and Russia, and she knows both their unspeakable barbarism and their tragic, romantic humanity. She’s read their literature, absorbed their art and architecture and she can detect it in the grim but frequently beautiful faces of their athletes. Their one outlet during the Cold War, that one moment when they could act out their individuality and personal passion inside a crushing totalitarian system. Why they tended to be what we call clutch players. No pair of Russian ice dancers has missed the Olympic podium in more than a generation. It’s their redemption of all the personal fire the Soviet system extinguished, uh, systematically.

Short version? She always roots for the Russian people, the Russian athletes. We crossed swords last night because I was reluctant to watch Putin opening ceremonies propaganda that papered over the crimes of the Soviet Union. Today, honestly, I am more pissed at NBC than I am Putin. Nobody mandated that a major television network had to pander to the latest in a long long long line of Russian dictators and spout his line of bull.

Much I also love about the Russians. Their architecture, their m.usic, (some of) their literature, their solemn devotion to ballet, their love of the land. But most of all the passion for life itself that survived, and burned, for close to 80 years of the most murderous totalitarian regime in the so-called civilized world. They still know something of romantic love. Astounding. Orwell refuted, when you think about it.

Earlier today, I had to ask myself whether I’d prefer the Canadians or the Russians to win the gold medal in team figure skating. Had to admit I preferred the Russians. So sue me.

In closing, same pair, but this time Romeo and Juliet.

Oh. Did I forget? You don’t always win just because you’re the best.

Here endeth my case.

P.S. There’s another guy blogging now. He wants me to join him. I knew him in another life. He has a garage. He keeps asking and asking me if there’s anything keeping me here. I tell him, sure there is. Absolutely. No doubt. People who check in every week or so if they’re not too busy. It’s great. He says he has a cherry Hemi 427 in an original purple Roadrunner that could make Costa Rica in 31 hours. I tell him I have to be here for the people who depend on me to be there for them when they have time, and he says, cool, cool, we can be back in 62 hours if your missus doesn’t have to stop for p-breaks too often. If any of us feels like coming back, that is. Aren’t they all really more important than you and your semi-retired wife? They don’t need you. They’re going like gangbusters, or some of them are, and who cares about the ones who aren’t? Not cool, right? Why should you have any time for them?

I don’t know. I know this guy from way back. I owe him. He saved my life once. Something about cars and all. He says he has a cherry Roadrunner. And I’m talking to myself here. “It’s time to go,” he says. “Time to run like hell.”

He’s talking about an ultra secret canyon in Costa Rica, where everything works like clockwork, meaning the able ones make money and don’t even have to talk to the ones who don’t. Which is kind of the best definition of utopia. When you get yours, you get to stop talking to everyone. Wish I’d learned that before I, well, forgot it. Cherry Roadrunner.

500 HP off the lot.

Actually, I think Johnny wants me to stop talking to anyone. He’s a fucking killer, and he despises everyone but me and Alice. I’ve tried to keep him at a distance all these years, but it’s getting harder.

Consciousness keeps shrinking. We’re reaching the point where the comet that’s heading for earth is only a delay in our meeting. Johnny is tugging at my coat. “Go,” he says. “They don’t get it. No matter how much they say they do, they just don’t.” He tells me that the current regime will absolutely wind up killing me and my wife. We’re the new expendables. I’m okay with with that if the younger ones can fight for the lives of their own children.

“But they won’t do that either,” Johnny says. “They’re living in a cotton candy view of life. They think a smile is security.”

Johnny Dodge. Jeez. I guess these are just my bad dreams. Because sometimes his name is Daniel Pangloss. But Daniel is worse than Johnny. Far worse. He tells me there’s nowhere to run. He tells me Johnny is a no-account. On the other hand, he’s presently sleeping on a cot in Johnny’s Garage. He’s the guy who makes the passports.

Shammadamma. My queen will rescue me from silence. She’s already rented a bay in Johnny’s Garage. He knows her from the old days too.

Silence. The balm of the fatally busy. Then, suddenly, beyond all reason, silence is golden.