One More Year: The Romantic Path of Ana Lee (The Path Less Taken Series Book 1)

by SJ Cavaletti

  Inability to engage with another person about our deepest emotions leads to isolation. And being lonely when you are married or in a relationship is a horrible existence. Often, we dancers fill the void of friendship so that men can retain the guise of happiness at home. We listen; we council; we soothe. I don’t think even my customers realize how much they need me. Men are still so out of touch with their emotions they’d rather think it’s about sex.

  Larry’s visit involved friendship at its finest; we had a blast with this creature. He really was a loving guy. He was genuinely interested in us as people, fun and honest. He was also the glue that brought me, Angelica and Jamie together from that night onward. He told us about his need for women’s clothes and I was surprised by his story. Up to that date, I had never actually met a man who wore women’s clothes without first having been dared. But that fact changed quickly after this night as it was the one where my motley crue of friends was first assembled.

  Larry told me that he had always dressed up in his Mom’s clothes. He and his lovers had played dress up once in a while behind closed doors and before his true professional career began he had used Halloween as an outlet. I asked him what drove him to do it… he simply said, “Feeling pretty, you get that, don’t you?”

  Larry was not gay, simply a cross-dresser. It’s hard to separate the two but he was straight as an arrow. Never mind the label, I enjoyed and still enjoy this person immensely whenever he returns to Brick Road and have continued to see him regularly over the past year. He’s like the crazy uncle I never had.

  That evening, after the lights came on, as Jamie, Angelica and I put on our sneakers, boots and jeans, we sat together counting our cash. It seemed impossible that someone had come into the club with more than three grand in cash for tips alone. Including our funny money cash out, we each made more than two thousand dollars from Larry that night. We couldn’t help but giggle and as we were all drunk and high, we decided to head to Jamie’s apartment for a nightcap.

  We climbed up four flights of stairs in a dark hallway that smelled of Chinese cabbage and fried spring rolls. I heard voices speaking Chinese behind the door on the second floor and wondered why anyone but dark dwellers like us would still be awake. Once we opened her door on the top floor, it was immediate relaxation. Jamie’s apartment was lived in in a way that mine was not. It had framed artwork everywhere, lots of soft furnishings. She quickly lit a candle, of which there were many, and we curled up with fluffy couch pillows and blankets for a chat. It was an oasis. With so many transients in San Francisco, it was wonderful to be in a place that felt so secure.

  “I can’t believe that Larry is so repressed that he would fork out that much just to wear women’s panties,” Jamie said.

  I appreciated her comment so much. Sensitivity prevailed over greed. Jamie, in the future, turned out to be the one I always ran to for practical advice.

  I chimed in, “I did the math and although I couldn’t weigh in for tips left on his card, he must have spent somewhere near eight thousand…drinks, tips, room fees, drugs. That really is crazy and a bit sad. He’s actually really nice and I can’t help but think that people shouldn’t have to pay that much for privacy when their desires are so harmless.”

  Angelica laughed at me then added, “You’re a nerd, huh?” She proceeded to act like a robot and say beep boop bee… She was the consummate joker.

  I laughed.

  “Yeah, you pegged me.”

  “I couldn’t even understand half of what you were talking about in the club. At first I thought it was just too loud tonight but your vocabulary… Being with you is like when I was little and had to sit through spelling bees.”

  “Well that doesn’t sound good… you mean I’m boring?”

  “No! I have to concentrate!”

  We all giggled. Then she asked where I was from and we talked about our histories until the sun came up.

  Jamie was from Florida. She came to California on the back of a boyfriend’s motorbike and was a quintessential rock girl. With bleach blonde hair broken up by copper locks, she was hot in a “wrong side of the tracks” kind of way. Her hooded eyes oozed of sex appeal and her voice like a raspy cartoon. She was very likable as it was immediately obvious that she was not one to assume she was right. After so many years in formal education it was nice to be around someone who didn’t care if she was right or wrong. She asked lots of questions and was almost childlike on the surface.

  Jamie’s cross country move did end up in heartache as her boyfriend broke up with her almost immediately after the move in order to concentrate on his art (he was actually a killer painter and Jamie had quite a few of his works in her flat). She didn’t hold it against him, in fact, she took up dancing to support him in his passion. Jamie was not book smart but she was wise in the ways of the world and made astute judgements about how human beings typically behaved. To many, it may have seemed that she didn’t see what was coming but over time I saw that wasn’t the case; she took risks and accepted that he decisions could lead to heartbreak. She was an unselfish person- never the most important character in any of the stories she told. In fact, that first evening, I learned more about her ex than I did about Jamie.

  “So you’re telling me,” said Angelica in disbelief, “that you came here with a boyfriend, he dumped you and then you took up dancing to give him money?”

  It did sound crazy, I had to admit.

  “The thing is guys, Ben and me went way back. I mean, we were friends from this high,” she held out her hand and indicated knee height.

  She continued, “I really am the one who chased Ben. We were best friends really and then when I started get all hormonal and going through puberty I asked him to a school dance. From then, he was my boyfriend. We never did anything but kiss though all the way through high school. Then, the last prom night I begged my Mom to pay for a stretch limo. So corny now that I think about it. Anyway, I pretty much jumped his bones. Looking back I’m not sure he wanted to have sex.”

  I sort of felt where this was going…

  “So right after we graduated high school he told me he wanted to move to San Francisco. I said I would come. The thing is, Ben never said ‘no’ to me. We really were best buddies. We both packed some things to ship over and did a cross country trip on this motorcycle he bought with his graduation money.”

  “You never had sex again, did you?” asked Angelica with a cocked brow.

  “No,” said Jamie.

  “He was gay, right,” Angelica said, as if guessing the answer to a riddle.

  “Yeah, I think so. I mean, he never really admitted to me,” said Jamie, “But when we got here he broke up with me and moved out of our studio. He said he needed to concentrate on his art. He did earn a place into the Academy of Art. He’s really an amazing painter.”

  She looked over to a large two by three foot oil painting of herself that clearly Ben had painted for her. She looked mesmerizing in the painting. I couldn’t help but notice that Ben saw Jamie’s eyes in a different way than I. While I saw innocence and questions, he painted them as sad, even haunted.

  “So, Ben always stuck by me so I stuck by him. I was bartending at the time but it didn’t bring in much. One of the girls at the bar where I worked was also a bartender at a strip club… anyway, the rest is history. I gave Ben money for about two months and then he ghosted me.”

  “What a dick,” said Angelica.

  Jamie looked hurt.

  “Well, he probably couldn’t deal with you seeing him as he was,” I said, “Maybe he thought that would be more disappointing to you than letting you keep your memories as they were.”

  Jamie looked at me, she digested my words.

  “Yeah,” she said sadly, reminiscing, “I mean, he’s definitely gay. It was so obvious looking back. I suppose he just couldn’t tell me.”

  “Course it’s obvious,” blurted Angelica, “Who wouldn’t want to fuck you?”

  Angelica could always lighten the m
ood.

  Angelica was nearly the opposite of Jamie in every way. Jamie, a southern blonde and Angelica a Puerto Rican New Yorker. Looks were just the beginning. Angelica loved to share (she allowed us to freely snortle up every last speck of her powder that night) but she was also an opportunist and knew less about who she was as a person than Jamie. Jamie was a stagnant soul, she would not change who she was not because she was stubborn but because she was comfortable in her own skin. On the other hand, Angelica was a seeker… looking to constantly become and unbecome as life went on. She was still in a state of discovery.

  We planned to meet up at the bar the next night. At the point in time where I met these gals, I really needed them. Over the past two years I had become a real loner. As a result of an avalanche of events I lived largely in secret; being a dancer was the only thing that saved me from being almost completely mute. Apart from Teddy and Vincent, who you will meet later, I hadn’t made any real friends. I spent many days and nights wandering the streets of San Francisco on my own, playing tourist. I needed girlfriends and I finally had some. I went to bed that night with a smile on my face. My life had just become a whole lot richer… in every sense of the word.

  Sean Connery

  I know many people think that strippers sleep all day and work all night. Although she was a hooker, the image of Kit in “Pretty Woman” struggling to make her daytime meeting with Viv was pretty much how I saw ladies of the night before I became one. And, that is a cliche you can pretty much take for truth for most dancers. But not for me. Rain or shine, drugs or not, being nocturnal did not suit me. So whether I hit the hay just after work at two-thirty or at six in the morning, I would set my alarm for seven hours later to ensure my retinas saw some sunshine. Anyway, I hadn’t moved to San Francisco to sleep it away.

  I remember my first trip to this city. I stepped out of the airport and smelled a change in the air immediately. It had an eerie familiarity; the new sensation of this city reminded me of the time when I had been due to have a benign, but very painful tumor, taken out of my abdomen. I had lied in the operating room and the anesthesiologists put the mask over my face. It smelled of bitter plastic and he told me to count backwards from ten. I knew at the time I was about to tumble into some scary and unknown world but I also trusted that on the other side of that space was another universe that brought much remedy and relief. And, that is pretty much what moving to San Francisco did for me. It was a much needed transformation, though unlike the operation, it wasn’t the biopsy I had hoped for. My past continued to live in the present.

  Before that first trip to San Francisco I lived in New York where I went to college and was a math major. I booked the visit on a whim after meeting up with an old schoolmate who had come to the Big Apple for a weekend break and asked to have a beer with me. It was my last semester of university and I was in hiding, trying to keep my head down and just get to graduation. I rarely met up with anyone because at that point I had already gone to the wrong side of the tracks. I avoided everyone, especially people with whom I had a history, but AJ had always been a compelling character and we had shared a lot of memories, as we had known each other since I was 14. It wouldn’t have felt right to not meet up when he told me he had come to town.

  AJ was someone I had never quite pegged. He was a hardened, almost aggressive radical on the outside but his approach to solving the world’s problems was soft. He rallied for black equality all the while being engaged to the whitest WASP I had ever known, a girl from our mutual secondary school named Moira. AJ was super intelligent and was somehow managing his last year of college and interning for the NAACP. I actually learned a lot regarding racial matters in America by reading his newsletter Black Spectacles, a great double entendre for its content. The newsletter attempted to have readers both see the world through a black person’s eyes through fictional re-telling of current events. It also celebrated achievements within the black community. He could easily do the talking and I felt confident I could avoid any deep dive into my own life.

  I was and still am quite a serious person so AJ and I always got along quite well, being able to tolerate one another’s depth, which oftentimes was ill placed in conversation. AJ never talked about anything light-hearted and seemed to use travel as escapism. He endeavored to travel to every country in the world one day and had just returned from Saipan. He had done so via San Francisco and couldn’t get off the topic of the hilly city. When he said, “Man, San Francisco is the type of city I could live in,” I decided to treat myself to a graduation present- a plane ticket to SF.

  Two months after executing that vacation to SF, I had become a resident. It was time to start fresh. To leave behind the perverted life I had pursued as a matter of consequence and to get back to being ‘normal.’ So as soon as I got to San Francisco I began looking, like every fresh-faced college grad, for a job. As it turned out, finding a job with no contacts or work experience was really tough. Straight As and Mensa don’t count for much in the real world.

  It was a sad day when I sat with my pride and college degree at the temping office, melting after a long, humid bus ride. It was an unusually hot day. My hair was matted and my upper lip a slightly different shade than the rest of my face from dabbing the persistent moisture which also consumed my make up. My sweat smelled sour after hitting the polyester of the blazer I wore. I sat between a man in a t-shirt and shorts that, despite the heat, wore socks with his Birkenstocks, and a very thin, mousey middle aged woman whose clothes were two sizes too big. Neither of them looked ready to take dictation or do data entry, which were my old school notions; for some reason temp work always involved being a secretary.

  It turned out, although dated, my assumptions were not far off. I spent the next few weeks catching buses and trains at five-thirty am to get to offices that were actually nowhere near public transport. One of the places, where I did filing and no one ever asked my name, was nearly a thirty-minute walk from the nearest bus stop. It was mundane to say the least but paid a few bills to say the most. I didn’t hate it, as at least I was employed, but sadness and discouragement featured in my long journeys home. That was until I met Sean Connery.

  Although I had done the requisite reasoning, I had been nevertheless slightly disappointed that 007 didn’t come to fetch me from the secure lobby at Merrill Lynch on my first day temping at the bank. But like his namesake, the bank manager was still handsome and charming and actually called me by name as he reached out his hand to greet me. It was a welcome gesture after feeling like, and admittedly being, a completely disposable body for several weeks.

  This chapter of my life was inconsequential in some ways but monumental in others. Sean was a lovely man who immediately took an interest in who I was. He brought me a coffee every morning (which I never drank) and asked me some questions. He apparently wasn’t very busy.

  After a couple weeks he said, “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. I’ll find you a job here; you need a permanent position.”

  Here’s the abridged version of how the rest went down:

  ME: No thanks. I’m looking for work in the non-profit sector.

  SEAN: You’ll need health insurance.

  ME: I’ll take my chances.

  One week later…

  SEAN: I found a position that I can give you…you’d find it interesting. Not answering phones. It pays well.

  ME: That’s very kind of you but I won’t be in your applicant pool.

  One week later:

  SEAN: I’ve looked at the pay bracket for this marketing job I found, I think you’d like it… the pay grade is above what you’d ever look to get in the market these days. And, seriously, you need health insurance.

  ME: (Laughing) I’m fine. Seriously, thanks but no thanks.

  One week later…

  SEAN: I’m going to offer you the most I can without it becoming an issue for this position I found you. It will be better than answering phones… you’ve got insurance, car allowance, bonus scheme,
401k… I don’t want to overstep the line here but you’re being stupid, yes I said it, stupid if you say ‘no’ again.

  ME: (Smiling) Sean, I already said I’m holding out to pursue my passion… I can’t be bought.

  SEAN: Everybody has a price. There’s your life lesson. You are a smart cookie but if you don’t take this job, you’re not as intelligent as you think you are.

  ME: (Smile faded)

  That stopped me in my tracks. He was right. Everyone has a price. Every indecent proposal has a tag on it with the right number. When I went home that night and realized I was creeping into debt paying rent on credit cards and the phone wasn’t ringing off the hook with offers from the Bill Gates Foundation, I conceded to his sense of facts just a bit. It took me a couple more years to realize the scandalous and holistic truth of what he had said.

  The next day, I signed on the dotted line and the year that followed isn’t really worth mentioning. Merrill Lynch did give me health insurance but never managed to give me the life I wanted to lead. It never got me out of debt and never allowed me to live out the dreams of travel nor of saving the world with spreadsheets. But I still thank Sean Connery for teaching me a great life lesson and helping me transition into this beautiful city. When Merrill Lynch seemed a dead end, I dug out my 7 inch stilettos from college… Sometimes I wish I had had the courage to call Sean and tell him. I should have, I bet he would have been a good customer.

  Carlos