The Twitter post sat under my profile
photo for almost two days.
"Bummed about Sydney Pollack."
It was pithy, but it was
all I could muster at 2:30 in the morning. Sydney was dead. I had woken
up in the middle of the night and rolled a drowsy finger over the laptop’s
touchpad to light up the screen. The news feeds, usually dormant on
Sunday nights, served up the reports.
In the information age, we pay tribute
to the fallen by obsessing over their lives. Their likes, their affairs,
their habits, their addictions, their maledictions. And everything in
between. And like bulimic cheerleaders at an all-you-can-eat buffet,
as soon as we are done stuffing our faces, we look for the first, most
inviting place to vomit the newly acquired information. For the next
weeks, we’ll jam these new factoids into unsuspecting conversations,
until we convince ourselves that we have completely exorcised the subject
from our bodies and are ready to move on. It sounds shallow, but so
is putting flowers on graves.
Pollack’s tributes were particularly
crass. Robert Redford reminisced about Pollack’s proclivity for big
commercial films, as if he was talking about a good friend with an appetite
for prostitutes. And the New York Times plunked out an obit that almost
apologized for his apparent lack of visual style. By the time I was
ready to go to work, I was sick of the spectacle. A bulimic cheerleader
without an appetite.
I admit, Pollack didn’t have Antonioni’s
sophisticated eye, Fellini’s imagination, Scorcese’s bravado, or Coppola’s
Kurtz-like drive. But so what? His work moved me! In fact, Pollack’s
work moved me on such a deep level, that in the summer of 1999, I masturbated
to Tootsie.
I’m gonna let that soak in for a
minute…
Yes, I whipped it out for the Tootz!
I was living in Puerto Rico at the
time, and I had just moved out of my girlfriend’s apartment, after leaving
a Dear Jane letter on her pillow. It was a shitty thing to do, but it
was the third break up in 10 months, and I just didn’t want to argue.
My new place was a dump, but like
the cheap motel it smelled like, it included cable TV. The furnishings
consisted of a LazyBoy chair in front of a TV set, atop a cardboard
box. It was dismal. The only activity to complement the decor would
have involved a crack pipe.
I suppose I should have been hitting
the town now that I was single again. But relationships are a lot like
cigarettes: even when they give you cancer, you still want one. Besides,
despite its tropical wonderment, nightlife in San Juan was going through
a weird phase (or maybe I was). The ’80s were clinging with a vengeance.
Air Supply and REO Speedwagon were still selling out arenas, and it
felt like every bar in the city had an ’80s cover band polluting the
air. It was a strange time, and I was trying to sift through the cultural
DMZ without getting my ass blown off. So I mostly stayed in.
By all standards, I shouldn’t like
Tootsie. The gender-bender story of a man disguising himself as a woman
to get out of a jam is a premise that Hollywood has been repackaging
ad nauseum ever since Billy Wilder slapped a wig and lipstick on Jack
Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot.
But under Pollack’s unobtrusive direction,
and Dustin Hoffman’s over-caffeinated performance, Tootsie is a revelation.
Here was the perfect woman. A good listener. Smarter than everyone around
her. And always able to handle a man with sticky hands. I couldn’t help
myself. I fell for her.
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