Strip (33 page)

You still hear it—big nose, big hose, big feet, big whatever. Daniel confirmed that old wives' tale. (Can you see old wives standing around the washtub sharing that information? Then a laugh, a nudge, a wink and the twinge of excitement or fear at the prospect.) And no, you don't need a nose to dance. But the nose of a man may be one of the sexiest of appendages, whether it curves down like an Arab's, has a Frenchman's bump, is severely aquiline like a German's, a big honking noble Roman thing or a brooding Jew's. It is nature's cruel joke if it disappears into his profile. The bigger it is, the more the heartache. Of course after what just happened up there in the penthouse of the depraved I see that size definitely has its drawbacks, makes it that much easier to hit—when it's yours that has come to blows—with the sharp side of a ring, the jewels, the family jewels, used as a weapon to set you straight.

And my balls. They've always been an asset. Some guys just don't have the volume. But mine are nicely grab-able and very sensitive, like I've got this extra organ flopping around down there. One big tickle-fest in my pants. I keep them shaved. Most people like the look, and the thought. People don't want to be picking pubes out of their teeth.

And that's it. The whole package. I don't want to throw cold water on you, but that's kind of how it went upstairs, like I told you, with the ring, the watch, the belt, the shirt, the tight jeans and then just the
g
-string and, and, and, my dick was feeling big and getting bigger. Sensitive. I pulled it earlier, cock ring and all, to make sure he got a good show.

I went for it.

I was stoned, but I am so cold and clear now.

Was I gyrating too much? Was I worrying about gyrating too much? Was I just too out of it? Or was I worried that I was too out of it? His looks made me harder, too, till I was full-fledged
tumescent
. I've heard that word enough since leaving Quebec. It has a real porn-mag sound, you know, like those guys' dicks are so painfully large, you'd touch them and they'd explode. Penis juice everywhere. So the cock ring and the pot gave me that swollen, cartoon character cock, cripplingly huge feeling in my dick. My skin was stinging. And there he was over on the recliner with fireworks in his underwear. Big, naked feet twitching like he was a little nervous or excited. I got too close. He touched my ass with his fingers, you know just a tickle but it really drove me nuts being high. He touched my balls. Batted them around a little. Then he got a little rough, a little wrestly and we were into the bedroom and on the bed and he was all over me, grinding his crotch. It was a pretty horny scene. I was thinking I was a lucky guy because boy, was he built. He pulled his underwear until it ripped and I caught the flash of too much dick. But whose show was this?

I tried to get a mouthful of that package, “his manliness,” as Kent would want me to say, but that's not what he wanted and then maybe it was too late. I don't remember. He was on my back and I was on my face.

“I'm not queer,” he said.

I struggled.

He shoved against my tight hole and then it wasn't fun.

I was dry.

He was strong.

It burned. Pulled.

I tasted his arm in my mouth. Yeah it was his arm, hair flesh.

Some blood too, come to think of it, to go with the pain and his big Indiana hands and a ring against my face. Something cracked in my neck as I struggled. I left behind being excited and accelerated into a fight for my life when suddenly I exploded and was outside my body. I see it all:

 

He's inside me.

The pain splits.

Me.

Apart.

The boy with the soapstone face, the blank eyes, the perfect teeth, the pouty lips, the swoosh of blond hair and the thighs of steel shot right off the bed. I landed somewhere between there and the wall, grabbed the sheet and fled—down the hall. Tears of pain blinded me.

Let me catch my breath.

And now, here I am at the bottom of the stairs. Explaining the art of taking off wrinkled clothes. Good he didn't chuck my ghetto blaster. I'm dragging myself down the hall now, to a wished-for laundry room where there will be an adjoining bathroom or closet and I can shove enough toilet paper in my ass and up my nose to keep from leaking on the subway on the way home, but God help me if I shit, fart, sneeze or even cough.

 

I don't remember getting
home. It must have been a cab. But then I dream. I dream of a man I love so much I sleep with his cigarettes under my pillow. He didn't die that March when I wasn't there to lose him. In my dream he is how I knew him for six months when I was unaware that I would never be this happy or this in love again.

I wake. My dream's puppet. I eat just enough. Dress myself. Wander on foot to Cabbagetown, as a late spring chill wanders through me. At the Necropolis Cemetery his warm ashes elude me. I find no rock or name to get heartfelt over. A young man with thick hands and a round ass cradled into the seat of his pants tells me that the parents have the ashes. There is no evidence, no record, nothing for me. I turn. Begin my wander homewards. My dream has lied. Instincts have betrayed me as much as good sense did, in the beginning. I enter a corner shop on Parliament to squeeze the last chill out of my flesh and garments. An old hippie with a swollen, pitted nose sits behind a desk, asks my name, my profession. He hopes it's his mind that will impress. Chats me up. Nothing. He noticed me going to the cemetery. He tells me all of the things I heard once from other strangers—and wanted to believe. All about me being a fine cut of a man and handsome, too. He's arrogant. He wants dinner,
perhaps lunch
, he says, unconditionally with no strings, genital, oral or anal, attached. I bare my teeth and the smile protects me from the beast. I imagine what his beard is covering must be even uglier. He gives me his card. I leave, trembling, and the cold races into places it had overlooked.

 

 

Epilogue

A dancer's blood…

 

There was blood on
the sheets after. That was my first clue. But what's a little blood? It could have been my nose. When I reached the basement, I found the hoped-for laundry room, but it was secured tight. It was in the janitor's closet that I realized it, washing myself down the drain in the floor. To that moment I could have recited the choreography for
Raymonda
backward and upside down, as I stumbled down that stairwell, but it was the searing pain that changed that. I don't remember the ride home, or calling Rachelle after two days curled on my floor. Yes, the doctor gave his clinical explanation for the pain, looking over his glasses, eyebrows raised in sober doubt and judgement.

There was a warning about how things were being transmitted. He said something about blood. That's what it has boiled down to—other peoples' fluids. People could be dying at our feet and we'd be worried about not getting their spit in us or on us. Maybe it's a miracle I'm still alive. The monster could have cracked my neck and tossed me down the garbage chute. I can't fantasize about revenge. Did this one human not understand the excruciating pain that could be inflicted upon another? Did he think I would somehow give in? I only think of him now because a few weeks later I saw him at the grocery at the end of his street, with his wife and kids who I doubt knew of his pad on the twenty-eighth floor. He is still up there, in that nasty place.

I am here on my steps, staring at trees bigger than houses, just starting to turn shades of red and orange. No, I am not in Cabbagetown. The guy who got the position with
ddt
is. He can barely call himself a dancer. How long had it taken the choreographer to take a shine to him? I remember the reflection of his angry glare at the audition. Jealousy, I thought. But now he's in like a dirty shirt. And now, in fact, living in Cabbagetown with the choreographer, the florist's ex, dancing badly, trying to make up for a lack of training and care, and love of dance. He will never bring to that company what I could have brought to it.

 

In spite of the
pain I felt every time I so much as thought about sitting on a toilet (worrying if you're going to die when you take a shit is a great distraction from mourning the death of a friend), I had to figure out what to do next.

In the days that followed, Rachelle put me on what we called “the home plan”—a self-imposed seclusion inside my apartment with myself, my memories of Kent, an empty notebook and a pen.

“I don't want you going out,” she said.

“With this sore ass?”

“Call me at wardrobe. I'll come by on my way home.”

For two weeks she dropped by with liquids, yogurt, soup, smoothies. For four weeks I had a brow that was permanently wrinkled from the pain, but gradually over several nights it let up, and the more I slept the better I felt.

After four weeks, she came by with a bottle of what we called bubbly booze, since it wasn't wine and we weren't sure what it was made from. “I have news. I have a plan. I want you to hear me out,” she said.

“Let me guess. You're going to audition as an alternate for the National?”

“Yeah, for their fat corps.”

“Corpulent corps.”

“Oh shit off right now.”

“You insensitive bitch. Don't you know pooing hurts? I can say whatever I want.”

“Fine. Be that way. I can go home and you'll never know.”

“Okay. I'm more than sorry about that.
Pleeeease
, tell me your plan.”

“You sure?”

“Sure. Speaking of, I had a better movement today. I'm feeling up.”

She clasped her hands and put her knuckles to her lips. “Well, our friend Peter…”

“As in
Peter
Peter?”

“The very one.”

“He's quitting, right?”

“How did you know?”

“I didn't think he could do it.”

“Well he's quitting and…”

“And?”

“And if he comes here, and if I start dancing, and if we can get a few more bodies…”

“Bertrand and Louise?”

“Sure, your friends from Quebec?”

“Yes. Then?”

“Then guess. Oh Jesus. We could have a company.”

“Who'd run it?”

“Us, you idiot.”

“I could…”

“You could do whatever you want.”

“…choreograph?”

“Why not? You said it was all that made sense now. Peter wants to dance. I want to dance. You want control? Here, I hereby give you control. Do it. Do it for us. Do it for five, maybe six, maybe more people who are desperate to dance. Do it for yourself. Look at you. You have come such a long way. You know you're a beautiful dancer. You're smart. What else is there? Of course there's still time to be a dentist. You want to be a dentist? Do you want to change people's lives, or just their fillings?”

“A nice smile can go a long way.”

“This is important. We could be important.”

 

It's no surprise if
you thought I'd be on my way back to Biltmore's, maybe to get a shift or two, like a moth to flame, after the mess I'd been in. But I only went because I noticed Brittany's picture in the Toronto paper as a Sunshine Girl. They'd used a stock photo I recognized from the Chez Moritz and that's what caught my eye, looking over someone's shoulder on the streetcar. I wouldn't have shown my face in that backroom, but I was still on good terms in the front room; they recognized me.

“She's history, pal. She missed last night. Aren't you the
Grand Blond
?”

Brittany unlocked the door. The room was dark. I could make out the silhouette of a sheet wrapped around her. “Come in.” Her voice was a little rough, like it would be from sleeping, not from eating chocolate. But I could tell she was more or less straight. I sat on the bed and she touched my arm while we talked. “I can't believe you're here.” But there was a monotone to her voice and I got the feeling she couldn't really remember me. I tried to jog her memory about the Chez Moritz. She said everything had started to blur. I told her about the shitty audition, Kent, stripping, and then she perked up. I told her my impression of the stripping scene in Toronto. “It's just sleaze bags trying to take advantage of everyone, selling drugs, selling whatever they can, to pay off others.” But there was no sound. I went on. “I don't mind. There are lots of waitering jobs.”

But silence soaked the room.

“They said you missed a performance?” Did she know she'd missed a night? Did she know where in hell she was?

“How did your friend die?”

“I don't know. They don't know.”

“This gay cancer thing is weird.”

“I don't think it was that.”

“I think I know some girls who got it, or something. Seems the sinners are all being picked off one by one, the good ones, too. Do you mean it, about being a waiter?”

“If I'm lucky.”

“God. Look at you.”

“Yeah. Wow.”

“Do you want to tell me what being a waiter has to do with anything you've ever done before?”

“Well, I'm great at giving people what they want. I blend easily into the scenery. My parents would be thrilled that I'm not taking off my clothes. Hey, I'd finally have something in common with them. They love eating in restaurants. I love food, booze, fags. Undeclared tips.”

“Wiping out ashtrays? Scraping half-eaten crud into the slop bucket?”

“You've been there?”

“I'd rather die stripping.”

“Those are my options. Rock-bottom Rottam.”

“What day is it?”

“Saturday. You missed last night's show.”

The phone rang. I listened while looking into the dark. “Yeah, yeah. Well, fuck you very much. I already paid my bill.” She slammed the phone. “I guess you know what that was.”

“I guess.”

She sobbed into her pillow. “Fuck.”

She told me she was broke. That since Quebec almost everything she'd earned had gone up her nose, with a guy she'd met in Montreal, but then he ended up like all the others. And no one was out there to help her. Her Romanian asshole Chippendale stallion fell off the face of the earth. Her brother had hanged himself. Why bother trying to stay sane? After she downgraded the Cadillac to a rusty Malibu to nothing, she went back to cold turkey.

“Do you have any money?” she asked.

“Barely.”

“I just want to get back to Chicago. If you can get me back to Chicago, I'll do you a big favour someday. I don't know what. But I have friends. I do. You can come to Chicago. Just a bus ticket. I swear that's it. Okay, a bus ticket and a sandwich.”

“Kent had friends. Lots of them.”

“Friends are everything.”

I had to find a bank.

 

For years I've been
an instrument to someone else's agenda. Dancers are. Dancers are cogs in a huge choreographable universe. Dancers are the tools, instruments used to create stories. That morning after Kent asked me what I had to offer and it all stopped making sense, I knew that I could never turn back. I knew that the time had come to take the next step. I tried to hide from the truth. I could have turned my back so easily on everything but I knew that I would be running away. I had to honour a very real need.

 

I turned my back
on dance, then dance turned its back on me. But I was merely an instrument in the grander picture of what others were communicating. No one is indispensable. Anyone could have filled my role as second soloist. My body was a vehicle possessed by my ego, while doing the bidding of others. Dance is
my
tool now, like I was dance's for six or seven years.

You think you know the path the process will take. Last year, searching, meeting someone who helped me like Kent or Brittany, explaining to them where I'd come from and letting them help me get to the place I was going.

Someone believing in me.

Someone finally listening.

I have to remember that we're everywhere. Those who didn't quite make it for that sliver of what we thought was the only opportunity available to us. The women and men who devoted a young lifetime to the pain in exchange for a moment of glory or fulfillment on that stage, or in the studio. Others who teach it now, or design, score, light, or are professionals in office towers with their backs to the sun, or alcoholics deep into twelve-step programs pushing strollers, waiting tables, working the checkout at the grocery, four decades after they were told they were star material, and all the others in between. The cities are full of us, sitting in the good seats or sitting in the cheap seats, when we can afford it or when someone else takes us, takes pity on us—but showing up in spirit or in form when the Company comes to town.

None of us give in. Who didn't go down screaming and raging? There isn't one of us with broken dreams who doesn't burn to their toes to be given another chance to make it. Why? We're only here for a moment, but it's then, in that moment, that we want to let the universe speak to the world through us. We are the mediums, sylphs for the projections of the stratosphere, and will do whatever it takes because it feels so damn good and bad. It just feels, period. Chances don't slip by easily. You can't be exposed to the power, the beauty and the strength of creation, music, art, the human form, and not let it affect you. You can turn your back, but you will always regret it.

I can say it now (I couldn't then) that if you dance, or do any art for that matter, you'll leave yourself wide open for opinion. You won't please everyone. Dance flows. Dancers are dancers whether they like it or not. Dance, by its nature, is a function and a process. And if you think the only pleasure you will know is your own, then stop. You have to be generous or it will not thrive. Art is not perfect. The process is, but the product isn't unless you can change someone's life for a moment or forever. You will have to be crystal clear to your audience or you will make no difference. At least do your colleagues a favour—show perfection, show expertise, show originality. You will never be allowed to sit back on your heels or your sore, tight ass or hurting ego, because you have to dance all the goddamn time; that is its nature, like scaling a cliff with no rest stops. Like a shark that has to keep moving to keep water flowing through its body. Like Moira Shearer in
The Red Shoes
. You will never relax, let go and think,
Look at me
. You only get a few moments to enjoy the applause. If you think it's that moment to appreciate yourself, you'll trip up. You miss a beat and that's it: you stumble, fall and disappear. An inflated ego is a fleeting reward. It does no one any good.

 

Our tour starts next
spring in Chicago: performances and workshops. Then on to Ann Arbor, then Windsor where I will look up Kent's parents. Then the universities in Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa and Montreal, and finally Laval in Quebec City. We will perform a ballet I have been working on based on one of Nelligan's poems. I don't know who will be there. After that, who knows, a western tour perhaps?

 

In the summer I
went to Chicago and New York, but the number Brittany had given me was out of service, and any enquiries yielded nothing. I wished her the best, hoped she was still alive somewhere and being loved by someone good.

I did a pilgrimage with a small sum of Kent's money that Ruth gave to me, with orders to use it. I saw the masters: Pilobolus, Eliot Feld, Graham, New York City Ballet,
abt
, Joffrey, the Dance Theatre of Harlem and Merce Cunningham at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. (Did Madame still fantasize about New York?) I took class when I could, attended workshops, master classes. As my body distilled itself back to the essentials, I felt the reservoir replenish itself, this time to overflowing. All of it is now part of my vocabulary as I continue to invent my own language and definitions. I am a small part of that magic that people pay to see and share, wherever I work. The stories tell my truth.