After lo, these many weeks, I woke up all set to finally write about Kanye West and his genius hacking of the MTV Video Music Awards. After all, he made the front page of every newspaper in the English speaking world, and because of his antics, I now know who Taylor Swift is… and if she’s not at least making arrangements to swallow his load right now, she doesn’t know the definition of the word “grateful.”
But then Patrick Swayze had to up and die, which means I guess I’m supposed to go ahead and mock him, which, after all, is the kind of asshole thing that I do. And God knows that I’ve got the motivation for it, because that bastard made it nearly impossible to deal with women for most of my teenage and young adult years.
Dirty Dancing, the movie that launched a thousand prom themes, came out when I was sixteen years old, meaning I had to suffer through what felt like a million band parties where girls suddenly demanded that I be able to dance, or want to dance, or be able to count to four in a rudimentarily rhythmic manner. I was cursed by this development, interminably forced to shuffle awkwardly to Stairway to Heaven while silently cursing Swayze for not doing a romantic movie that included skill sets I had. Was pretty boy too much of a prima donna to take a chance on starring in Dirty Galaga? No? How about Dirty Star Wars Trivia? Pussy.
Not that I had ever seen the movie. I, along with pretty much every guy I knew, refused to see it, mostly in self-defense. We figured that if we could pass the attitude that Dirty Dancing was somehow beneath us, that maybe we could preemptively scuttle the newly-creeping female attitude that they had the God and Swayze-given right to expect ridiculous things from us like defined abdominal muscles, or, in fact, any upper-body strength whatsoever. I knew my limitations: even at sixteen I knew that being asked by a girl to lift her over my head Dirty Dancing-style would be a no less fantastic request than had she asked me to pick her daisies from the surface of the moon, or to stop prematurely ejaculating.
Things only got worse three years later when Swayze came out with Ghost. I was nineteen, and at this point at least smart enough to understand that taking my then-girlfriend to see Ghost was more likely to get me more than the dry, inexperienced through-the-pants handjob than I got at Robocop 2… of course, in retrospect, I understand that her move was less a maneuver of inexperience than it was an earnest attempt to punch my testicles off for making her sit through Robocop 2.
Needless to say, it didn’t work. Oh, she liked the movie, but she was watching a man on the screen so in love that he spurned heaven to protect Demi Moore… and somehow, the Marlboro-smelling wad sitting to her left who’d been fifteen minutes late picking her up didn’t quite measure up. The experience wasn’t all bad; on the plus side, Ghost made it okay for a while to reply to the statement “I love you” with something noncommittal like, “Ditto”… although experience has taught me that I could have done a little better than “*snort* – Whatever.” However, on the minus side, Ghost made girls feel justified in asking the question, “Will you love me after death?” To which I could only respond with a gentle smile while thinking, “Doubtful, since I currently loathe you after orgasm.”
And it would be easy to make fun of Swayze based on every other career choice he ever made in his life that wasn’t Dirty Dancing and Ghost. Magnum Opii such as Roadhouse, which is fun to watch provided you can funnel enough whiskey fast enough to ignore the fact that any owner of a shithole bar with the resources to hire a big-city bouncer to clean up the place probably has the resources to burn the place for the insurance. And let’s not forget Point Break, or: The Fast And The Furious With Surfboards, or: ESPN’s X-Games With Constant Implied Hot Sweet Man-On-Man Action. After seeing Point Break with yet another girl who swooned over the Mullet That Roared, I too would have jumped after him from a moving airplane with a .44 Magnum… although if I had done it instead of Keanu, the movie would have been fifteen minutes shorter.
I could make fun of Swayze for all of those awful career choices… but I’m not going to. And I’m not going to for a couple of reasons. The first being, yeah: the guy made bad career choices, which would be easy to cast aspersions against (And God knows I did between 1987 and 1991)… but a guy who voluntarily chose to persue career options in stand-up comedy and FM rock radio probably shouldn’t be the guy to do it. Shit, at least he made bad choices that allowed him to make a living. And sure; it would be possible to mock the guy for making a conscious career choice that required him to pretend to be attracted to Lori Petty… but once upon a time I accepted a job that required me to pretend to like fucking Creed. Considering my job responsibilities once forced me to press a button and force a quarter-million people to listen to Good Charlotte, I don’t think I have any moral high ground upon which I can stand to judge the man’s career decisions.
And second, no matter what the man did professionally, the way he faced his illness is Goddamned inspiring and almost baffling. After all: when a doctor says “pancreatic cancer”, he’s pissing away oxygen on a fifty-cent phrase for “You’re DEAD”. And Patrick Swayze faced that situation with more balls than Todd MacFarlane. In every interview I saw with the guy after he was diagnosed, he showed a courage and stoicism that I couldn’t put together in a similar situation if I had four morphine patches and a team of Doctor Feelgoods bullshitting me about my chances.
I’m the kind of guy who has a tendency to panic about my health. I have been known to wake my girl up in a state of high anxiety to ask her if she can feel a lump, only to be told, “Yeah… it’s a zit. On your earlobe. Did you really wake me up in the middle of the night to ask me if I thought you had fucking ear cancer? Go back to fucking SLEEP. And tomorrow night, drink more before you come to bed.”
So I’ll make fun of the movies (Which were pretty fucking awful), but I can’t make fun of the man. He got dealt a shitty hand and he played it with what appeared to be Zevon-level courage. And I’m not gonna be the guy to make fun of that.
But I will say this: before you go into the light, Patrick? Haunt Whoopi Goldberg one more time, and tell her the next time she gets the Oscar hosting nod to pass it off to someone who fucking deserves it for a change, like Letterman or Chris Rock. And make sure she tells Robin Williams and Billy Crystal that when they die? I’m going to beat them in print like red-headed stepchildren.
And maybe stop at Demi’s house and tell her to put Ashton in the fucking corner.
[tags]Patrick Swayze, Dirty Dancing, Ghost, Roadhouse, Point Break, dark humor, satire[/tags]
What, no Red Dawn shout out? Had my high school football team been expected to defend us from the reds, we’d all be speaking Russian with an extra double side helping of communist ultra marxism.
Yes, Swayze did show Zevon level fortitude. I defy you to listen to Zevon’s swan song “Keep me in your heart” without crying like a little bitch.
My high school football team actively tried to sell secrets to the Russians. Luckily, since those secrets were, “White suburban kids suck at football,” there were no takers at the Kremlin.
And I cry like a bitch at Lawyers, Guns and Money… because I have none of those things.