Entrante

"Our time here is short. We weren't meant to spend it this way."
Peter Gibbons, "Office Space"

I had a lot of ideas for how I was going to start this out once I got back. I figured I could talk about Chicago, or trip tips for little kids, or any of the various home repair and clutter negotiation processes I handled so expertly over the past couple of weeks.

Then I hear in my E-mail this morning, and confirm with some looking around a few minutes later, that Michael Tata, and ex-coworker seen most recently on "American Casino" was found dead in his home. He was 33.

I had told a number of people about this show, in both my E-mail circles, back home, and around town, because of Michael. I worked with him at the hotel and didn't like him. I don't think he liked me much either. We ran into each other after both of us weren't working there and said hello. He was pleasant, I was pleasant. He was making six figures a year at a job that my crowd at the hotel figured he wasn't very good at and didn't deserve. Michael ground his heels into people, just chewed them up, and was the classic example of someone who gets asked loudly for favors all day and then loudly asks for something himself. Some people sacrifice courtesy in the name of expedience, but others do it as a matter of practice. He was the latter. Michael complimented me once on something and I told my superiors, "To welcome his praise would validate his criticisms. I will do neither."

It's one thing to heap criticism on somebody when they're alive, and to do so from personal experience. I laughed that the show made him look shorter (he was something like 5'4") and about the fact that the show made him out to be a tyrant, which was certainly my memory of him. It's another to wonder if that criticism, amplified nationally, may have led to his death.

I remember now that he spent a month back home in Buffalo one Christmas to "get his head together about things." I wonder if he was prepared for what the show would do. His work was his life. His social circle was work. He may well have had friends out of the office, but I can think of several occasions in which the gist of his explanation for something's importance was that if he was there, I should be too. We were both there a lot, him more than me.

So, with my armchair expertise of these things, one of two things happened: Either stress killed him or he took his own life. Michael was one of the more tightly wound people I've ever met, and those of you that have known me personally know that's saying something.

I watch a lot of the Discovery Channel, and there's a few of these "American"-type reality shows that I've seen. American Chopper, American Hotrod, and this one. In the first two, the resultant publicity made the affiliated companies even richer than they'd already been. The Teutuls on "American Chopper" have very clearly parlayed their on-screen personas as bickering divas into significant riches. But none of these opportunities would await Mr. Tata. His reputation would precede him thanks to television and videotape, but the attendant riches would go to the hotel, not to him personally. Maybe he did see himself as a perfectionist instead of someone who seemed to be governed by "in the absence of genuine leadership capabilities, bitch about the smallest details, to the detriment of the bigger picture."

I popped over to the show's website to find his web page had been removed, viewer comments had been taken away, references to him at other pages was gone, et cetera. I fear that the show, which I haven't been watching, will make no references to his death; he was in a lead role and the show finishes its run August 9. And that's a shame. Michael was a cartoonish character to work with and came off as such in the parts of the show that I've seen, but he was still human. To deny him his reality is to trivialize a man's life, a life that is just as much a part of "reality" as the show.

"One owes respect to the living; to the dead one owes only the truth." -Voltaire