by Melvin Dixon
I was really trying not to feel sorry for myself. I was glad to learn new steps, even if I was dancing solo only in my mind. At least I was traveling in the light. Stagelight, yes. Artificial color, yes. But in movement with a kind of memory. Things you’ve felt or done before. Places you’ve been to. I thought I was really changing.
The first change had come when I found Jesse in the Village. That really frightened me, although I wasn’t aware enough of the strength of that fear to say anything about it. Not to Phillip. Not to myself. I realized how fixed Jesse was. It wasn’t just that he liked having sex with men. That wasn’t it. Jesse wouldn’t change on the inside. That’s where it mattered. I think he couldn’t change. I wanted him to see me for who I was. A woman, yes. A woman and not a room. I didn’t care that he also loved Metro and loved many other men. I thought I was special because I was the only woman he ever had. I thought I could show him places he never knew existed. Secretly, I wished he would stay there. He did care for a while. And we were close for a while. But Jesse still didn’t know who I was. And he didn’t know Metro. When I found that out, seeing how fixed Jesse was and fighting some invisible enemy inside him there in the warehouse, I knew it had to be over between us just like it probably had to be over between him and Metro. Only Metro had no place to go. For me, it was like a twig snapping in the woods, some leaf finally crumbling after it had dried out completely. Jesse and I didn’t have sex after that. We were friends, suddenly, not lovers. Almost brother and sister I loved Jesse like I loved Phillip. And I was scared to death for both of them.
That was why I let Phillip stay with me as soon as he was out on parole. We all went places together: Abdul, Phillip, and me. We walked everywhere, even in the chilly evenings, careful to avoid subways and dark streets. We were on the outside now. I heard the wind in my short, bristly hair and in the leafy hands of trees making noise like applause or laughter. Besides, it was springtime. It was time to laugh.
Phillip asked me about Jesse and I said that we were still friends. He asked about my dancing and I took him to the rehearsals. He liked the music most of all. Ellington, Coltrane, even the classical stuff by Stravinsky. “We dance to all music,” I told him. “And we do all kinds of dances.” I told both of them about Jesse’s dance when we had gone to an African restaurant for dinner. When we got back to my place, Phillip and Abdul looked at each other like something was going on between them. Then, to my surprise, Phillip pulled a bottle of champagne from the refrigerator.
“What’s the occasion?” I asked.
“Your first professional performance,” said Phillip.
“Aw, I perform all the time.”
“But you now have a stage to dance on,” said Abdul. “And people to watch you.”
We started joking then and drank more champagne until we couldn’t stop laughing, just the three of us, laughing at nothing much at all. Then Phillip excused himself for bed. That was odd. And early, too. Abdul stayed to talk some more. Something else was fishy, I thought. Like another signal understood by everyone but me. By this time Abdul and I were sitting on the couch. We had another glassful. I tried to keep from noticing how really handsome he was, how strong his hands were, holding mine.
He asked if he could be my boyfriend.
I said nothing. Then I smiled. “You got to promise that I can keep on dancing,” I said.
Abdul watched me carefully, too carefully. I couldn’t get enough of his eyes. “You got to promise you’re never going to stop.” He grinned, showing all his teeth. I closed his lips with mine and didn’t even think about taking another breath.
The next night was opening night. I wasn’t nervous one bit. Truth is, I wasn’t dancing solo any more.
Jesse
I TRIED TO TELL ROOMS ABOUT THE DANCE and the Ellington music I was working with. She kept telling me to call her Ruella, her right name, as if I didn’t know it or couldn’t let it go. I wanted to tell her about fast travel underground, about taking the A train. She said she’d been there before as Ruella, not Rooms. I had to remember to call her that. So I stopped talking about the A train and told her she was wrong thinking about me and Metro that way. It wasn’t like that between us at all. Then what was it?
My dance was about the A train, how close it ran between darkness and light. It wasn’t about Metro dying or wanting to die at all. And it wasn’t, as she said, about the only kind of travel I knew.
The A train got me to dance class in the first place. It ran along Eighth Avenue and all the way to Harlem and beyond. Once, riding with Metro, we missed the stop at 59th Street and realized our error too late. The next stop wasn’t until 125th Street. Harlem. The car shuttled nonstop on uneven tracks until it finally screeched into the station where Metro was an instant foreigner. I was cautious, more cautious than I had to be. I was still new to New York, and I thought about all the rumors I’d heard about Harlem more as a deadly place than the home it actually was for thousands of people as black as me. With Metro, I was afraid. People watched us suspiciously. They were wondering, perhaps, who I was with this frail man with glasses looking curious and lost. I tried to find the platform for the downtown train, and Metro kept staring at the people around us.
“So this is Harlem,” he said.
“Harlem,” I said. “We won’t see much of anything except this station.”
“Have you ever seen so many blacks?”
“Of course, Metro. You forget where I come from.”
“Yes, sometimes I forget.”
“You never get out of the Village. Except to work in midtown.”
“Is it dangerous? I mean, here?”
“No more than any other part of the city.”
“It reminds me of Baton Rouge on a Saturday night. New Orleans, too, but rougher.”
“You’re exaggerating, Metro. Come on, let’s get to the other side for the downtown train.”
“Wait a minute. Let’s explore a little.”
“Some other time.”
“What are you so apprehensive about? What do you have to be afraid of?”
“I’m thinking about you, that’s all.”
“I’m all right. I can take care of myself. Why are you so nervous?”
“I’m not nervous.”
“Well, let’s get out of the station and walk the streets or something.”
“Some other time. I’m not ready. Besides, I have things to do downtown.”
“You always have things to do.”
Then we heard the train and saw its lights bearing into the station. We ran up the stairs, across the passageway above, and down the other side. I held the door open. Metro got in reluctantly. He didn’t say anything.
“We’ll stay longer next time,” I said.
“You mean when we make another mistake?”
“I really mean it, Metro. I’m in a hurry this time.”
“I’ll go on my own,” he said, looking from the window and into the glare of stations passing by. “Besides, I need to know more about the city. For my job.” Then he was quiet for the rest of the rattling ride downtown. The silence between us made the trip seem longer than it was. We got out of the train at Columbus Circle.
“I don’t see what you’re so ashamed of,” Metro said. “You didn’t grow up there.”
“No, I didn’t,” I said. “But someplace just as bad.”
“Bad? What’s so bad about it?”
“Look, don’t try to tell me how to be black.” I said nothing more.
Metro made it to Harlem before I had a chance to go with him. He knew someone at work who had a place there. But Metro made it to Harlem by himself. He was in a hurry, he was anxious, as if there was something waiting for him there. But it had nothing to do with me. Nothing. Not even if Albany Avenue in Hartford had just as many fried-chicken stands and storefront churches as 125th Street. I knew where I came from, and I didn’t need any guilt-ridden white boy who had been to France telling me how to live. Or Ruella telling me which spaces to occupy. What
did Metro know about hugging the rusting radiator for heat in our apartment, or finding our kitchen plumbing clogged with roach shit, or how my college dorm room and scholarship had already been paid for by all the summer jobs I could have had if I had been white, or by all the rent increases we were charged for the same four-room apartment where Charlie and I heard our parents screwing in the next room, or by my traveling south with my mother on a train steaming somewhere in South Carolina where I couldn’t pee until we found the Colored Toilet back in 1957? What did Metro know about that? What did he care when all he wanted to do was to call me a nigger to my face and say it was love talking that way, that excitement and abuse went together in sexual pleasure like cock and mouth or cock and ass or black and white when he was fucking not me but the image of me and black men like me that he had always dreamed about as he sat on his Louisiana gallery swatting mosquitoes and dragonflies.
Which is what I tried to tell Ruella: I was calling Metro just what he was—although I hadn’t even been that far underground when I met him or followed the stare from his angular face, which became a ladder out of the occupied classroom at Wesman straight into his waiting hands. Hands that held mine tentatively on a walk through the campus at midnight or led me away from the dance stage in Manhattan to some filthy abandoned warehouse where the single word “nigger” had already sealed his fate and was about to seal mine.
I took a crosstown cab that afternoon. I was already late for dance class. Then I saw Ruella. She was pretty. And I knew right away through the dance of our black skins that if I didn’t feel her full beauty, I’d never know my own. I thought about my mother. Jessica. Boys named after their mothers are different. But that doesn’t give any of us an exclusive right to feel pain, or to hurt others. I tried to say that to Rooms. She made me say “Ruella” first. I could let the name go. I wanted to tell Metro, but he made me take the fast train uptown before he would even listen.
I had a chance to choreograph something. And to dance. I decided upon a simple dance for two men. A pas de deux to Ellington’s music. I watched black men everywhere for movement: in barbershops, on street corners, some reading the New York Times, some going in and out of expensive hotels by the front door and some by the service entrance. And I watched myself: my bend of waist while making the bed, washing dishes, stretching on the parquet floor. And I watched Rodney without his knowing it. I saw the oil glisten from his scalp. I heard the thickness in his voice. I caressed his thick thighs that leapt more powerfully than mine. I fluttered after the gleam from his fingernails as his arms commanded and decorated every space he entered. 1 saw his grace, his sureness and poise of movement. I wanted to celebrate us—all of us black men. I watched black Wall Street executives leaping from taxis and the man selling subway tokens near our block. I watched the kids playing handball against the supermarket wall and under the sign reading “No Ball Playing.” I watched black boys dribbling imaginary basketballs while waiting to take the subway to the next playground. And some balancing real basketballs while riding in the car. I watched white men and black men and short men and fat men and men who were interested in my watching them and others who were not. I wanted to contain them all: men who had come to New York from everywhere else to crowd subways or just go about their regular business of living. And I thought of poor Lonny and how he didn’t even know what he was doing. He didn’t get anything out of attacking Metro. A couple of weeks in jail, maybe. Some months, maybe a year away at reform school. What else? He was now just a shadow moving across the stage at City Center. He was in the dance, too. A menacing steady presence, a reminder like the ordinary rope that can change in a second to a lyncher’s noose or a rescue line out of some dark, endless hole. A reminder that if the business of living was costly in this city of windows and metal gates, the practice of loving could be deadly.
I asked Rodney if he’d help with the dance by practicing some of the trial combinations with me. At first he was reluctant because his ankle was still weak. He blamed the accident at rehearsal on Ruella, but I said it really wasn’t her fault. “That woman kept looking at you,” he said. “And I was looking at you. How could anyone concentrate with all that looking going on?”
Getting Rodney together with her later didn’t help much. He was silent and withdrawn. Later, he admitted being jealous, but only for an instant. And it was that very instant when he lost balance and control and twisted his whole foot. Lucky for him he had only a sprained ankle. We spent more time together back at West 4th Street. We exercised together and attended different dance classes so we could compare notes in the evening as we also compared the angle and depth of our own turn-outs, contractions, leaps, and stretches on the floor as we pulled from equal weight. But when I got the chance to choreograph to Ellington’s “A Train,” I thought only about Metro and what we shared. I told Rodney about my ideas. He lost interest in working with me.
“No wonder I had trouble with those combinations,” he said.
“Was it your ankle?”
“No, Jesse. Those weren’t my steps at all. They belonged to someone else.”
“How can you tell that? I’m not sure myself and I’m the choreographer.”
“By the way the knees bend. I can’t get that low. Don’t want to, either. I’m into leaps. I’m training for height and speed.”
“These steps aren’t fast enough? They’re closer to a tap dance than modern dance.”
“That’s just it. They’re fast all right. But they’re going the other way. Not where I’m headed.”
“I see. I’m sorry. I won’t ask you again.”
“No offense, Jesse. It’ll be a fine dance. But when you choose your dancers, try to work with them. Use steps they’re comfortable with. Give them a chance to express themselves, too. Isn’t that what dance is all about?”
“You’re right, Rodney. You’re absolutely right.”
I tugged at his hair, smoothed the oil on my lips.
I chose the dancers: one white, one black. We practiced after the general rehearsals and often stayed later than anyone else. The dancers liked the music: the grace and deliberate speed of it, the opportunity for improvisation in the rhythm, the solo and personal statement. We were off together improvising on the rush of travel as if we were the instruments and Ellington the conductor/choreographer. But we started playing a different tune than the one I heard riding the A train to Harlem. Even in the harmony of our fast travel underground and above ground we added leaps and double turns, for we were enjoying the ride, and we were going someplace else. We danced toward the flashing lights all through the tunnel, right on through the real moving rooms that held back the dark.
Lonny
OUTSIDE THE COFFEE SHOP the guy looked scared, like I was going to rob him or hit him or scream bloody murder. Then I smiled and he came up to me, still cautious like.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Fifteen.”
“I could get arrested for this. You’re a minor.”
“Doing what? We ain’t doing nothing.”
“I got a room nearby. In a hotel.”
“Doing what?” I asked him. He looked away from me and into the street like he was expecting something else to happen.
“The ten dollars I gave you,” he said.
“Doing what?”
“I can’t tell you here.”
I didn’t do anything but follow him around the block and up a flight of stairs. I just laid on the bed with all my clothes on. I didn’t move a muscle.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said.
I said nothing. I fingered the ten-dollar bill in my pocket.
“What do you want?”
“Make it hard for me. Can you do that?” he said.
“I’m too nervous.”
“Take your time. I won’t hurt you. I just want to look at it. I won’t even touch you.”
“Sure? You sure about that?”
“Sure.”
I eased my cock out of my pants and didn’t ha
ve to think about nothing else. I could smell the green money on my hands. It was a long time before I could even jerk myself off without pulling at the new stitches at the end of my balls. Now everything had healed. I made myself hard quick.
“You watching me?” I asked.
“Yeah. It’s beautiful. A beautiful cock.”
“You watching me?” I said, not moving my eyes from his twisting face.
“Beautiful. Beautiful,” he said, wiping the stains seeping into his pants.
I didn’t come at all. I couldn’t. After a moment my cock went soft. I put it back inside my pants and left. He didn’t even know that I was gone.
It was as easy as that.
The very next night I was back again. Same street, same corner. The same man was waiting for me. We went to the same hotel, the same room. It was just like nothing had changed.
“Make it hard for me.”
I made it hard.
“Beautiful. Beautiful,” he said. His mouth opened and closed. He made funny noises in his throat.
“Can I suck it?”
“Five more dollars,” I said, quicker than I really knew what I was saying and surprised I even thought it up so soon.
“All right. Here,” he said, throwing the extra bill at me. I pulled my pants down further. He put his mouth to work, and it felt good. Real good.
“Wait a minute,” he said.
