The Cat King of Havana

by Tom Crosshill

  By the end of the class, I arrived at two conclusions. One, salsa was a shuffling dance for old people. Two, my plan was a failure. I wasn’t good enough to play with this band. I wasn’t good enough to play with any band.

  We’d finished the last piece and I was already getting up when one of the students spoke to Ana and Gregoire. “Would you dance for us?”

  They looked at each other. Ana shrugged. Gregoire turned to Patrick. “Can you give us something interesting?”

  Patrick considered for a moment. “‘Mi Cama Huele a Ti’?”

  We played. It was a relaxed piece with a sweet melody on the trumpet, a salsa cover of a Tito “El Bambino” reggaeton piece that I had heard on Spotify. A dozen bars in, the guitar kid started singing in flawless Spanish, his voice smooth, adult.

  I barely noticed. I barely had the presence of mind to keep time.

  In the beginning, Ana and Gregoire hardly moved, shifting from side to side, their torsos swaying in graceful small undulations. They fell into the basic step, forward and back, just like the class had done except there was a charge to their every moment, a supple tension, so that theirs was not a dull lack of motion—it was fire held in check.

  Gregoire raised Ana’s arm in the air, and she spun once elegantly. He guided her around him in a graceful walk. He hooked his elbows over hers and drew her close, and they circled each other in an intimate embrace.

  How I wished to be him.

  The bongo player switched to cowbell, ringing loud and clear. The singer launched into the refrain, a sonorous complaint of how his bed smelled of the girl who’d left him. The music surged.

  So did Ana and Gregoire.

  They swung apart, arms outstretched, not touching. They spun in place, once, twice, thrice, perfectly poised. They circled each other in taut, stalking steps, watching each other. They rushed forward, except they never collided, but came together and spun, spun, spun around the floor, Beauty and the Beast in their ballroom.

  It was not a thing for words, their dance. I won’t give you the blow-by-blow. The best I can do is tell you how I felt, watching it. My heart raced ahead of the salsa beat, and my breath came fast, and shivers shot up and down my body. I no longer saw Ana, only the dance itself. Lost in it, drunk on it, at once ecstatic to behold it—and frustrated that I couldn’t be part of it.

  When they finished, it took me a while to realize that my fingers no longer moved. That the class had been applauding.

  In a daze, I rose from the congas. If I had let myself think, I would have stopped. Quickly, I walked to where Ana drank from her water bottle.

  “You were awesome,” I said to her.

  She looked me over nonchalantly. “You weren’t.”

  “Er . . . ,” I said. “I’m not really a drummer.”

  “You’re that cat guy,” she said then.

  I blinked. “You’ve heard of me?”

  She pointed at my chest, the corner of her lip twitching.

  I looked down and saw my T-shirt. It featured a fat gray tomcat squished upside down into a glass preserve jar. Except the cat’s got my face Photoshopped on. Above the picture, red letters spell out THAT CAT GUY in Comic Sans.

  Rob Kenna gave me that shirt on my birthday, in front of the whole class. I put it on right there, out of principle. To show that bastard he couldn’t get to me. I told everyone I liked the thing—and managed to convince even myself.

  Now, with Ana’s eyes on me, I was acutely aware how I must look in it. Skinny brown arms sticking out of baggy sleeves.

  No choice but to go all in.

  “That’s right,” I told her. “I’m New York’s first cat video tycoon. My site, CatoTrope.com, is the go-to destination for feline footage connoisseurs.”

  “Cato-trope?”

  “Like zoetrope,” I said. “Or like catastrophe.”

  “So you’re like a cat lady except younger?”

  “I don’t even have a cat,” I said. “I just make money off them. It’s sort of a family business.”

  Which was almost true, if you considered Mom’s folder of cat videos my start-up capital.

  “Fascinating,” Ana said. “I need to set up a website. Could you help me?”

  I flinched.

  A website. So that’s why she was still talking to me.

  I wanted to tell her to build her own damn website.

  What I said instead was, “Sure! Just tell me what you need. Let me give you my email. Oh, and here’s my cell. Call me anytime!”

  Yeah. I’m smooth.

  “The thing is,” Ana said, “I don’t have much of a budget.”

  “Well . . . ,” I began. “Maybe you could . . .”

  I stopped. Remembering all the times I’d been called a klutz. Remembering what Flavia Martinez said about my “Poker Face” dance. Knowing I had no chance in hell at getting as good as Ana.

  But I remembered also what it had felt like to watch her dance.

  “Maybe you could teach me salsa,” I forced out.

  The world kept right on spinning.

  “What kind of salsa do you want to learn?” Ana asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The stuff you were dancing.”

  “Cuban, then. Salsa casino.”

  “My mom was Cuban,” I said. “I don’t think she was much of a dancer, though.” For all the salsa we listened to at home, I’d never seen her dance.

  “Just because you’re Spanish doesn’t mean you can do the paso doble. I’m Puerto Rican. Boricua, ya tú sabes. But I learned to dance from this French guy.” Ana tossed her head at Gregoire. “You’ve danced before?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I don’t teach,” Ana said. “But come dance with us. At our school. I’ll get you a discount.”

  So maybe I should have bargained, should have said a discount wasn’t enough to pay for a new website. But I didn’t care about that in the least.

  Ana hadn’t laughed at my request. She hadn’t called me crazy. She’d said, “Come dance with us.”

  Funny thing about failed plans. They get you places all the same.

  chapter two

  I CONNECT WITH MY ROOTS

  An observation:

  You upload a video where Mr. Porcelain leaps from sink to kitchen island, lands elegantly, and proceeds to drink the milk from your bowl of cornflakes.

  It gets a thousand views.

  You put up the same video, except with more footage. First, Mr. Porcelain leaps and falls to the ground short of the island. He leaps again and hits the edge of the island, and tumbles to the ground. Finally, he takes a running start and leaps and makes it. To a background of trumpets, he laps up your milk.

  This version gets fifteen thousand views.

  Interpretation:

  Up to you, really. Perhaps we enjoy watching the suffering of others. Perhaps we enjoy feeling superior. Plausible explanations, both of them. I’m sure there’s some truth to both.

  I have another theory. I figure watching someone struggle gets us into their skin. When Mr. Porcelain plummets to the floor, we identify with his problem because we too learn by trial and error. Seeing him fail, we consider what we’d do in his place. We get invested in his struggle as a kind of mental role-play. When Mr. Porcelain succeeds we cheer not only him, but also ourselves.

  That’s why the second video gets fifteen times more viewers. Not because Mr. Porcelain bonking his head against the kitchen island is hilarious. Because people empathize with his fight. That’s what I choose to believe.

  Why do I mention this? Oh, no reason.

  No reason at all.

  Some weeks later, on the first of March, Ana met me at the door of Chévere Dance Academy.

  “There you are,” she said. “I wondered if you’d show.”

  My lips tugged up into a smile. Ana wore skintight leggings and a sports tee, and let’s just say I was distracted. “Did you?”

  “Sure. Come to the office.”

  Chévere occupied a three-story
brick building off the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. The first-floor dance hall was long and narrow, hemmed in by mirror-covered walls. Soaring ceilings gave it a cavernous feel. An enormous fan turned in one corner, but the humid air smelled of Pine-Sol and sweat. Large colorful photos of Cuban street scenes covered the walls. I recognized the grand colonial houses of Trinidad, Mom’s birthplace.

  Ana led me to a glass office in the far corner. That tanned-looking French guy, Gregoire, looked up from a computer.

  “This is Rick from Patrick’s band,” Ana said. “He’s here for your new class. Give him a month free on my account.” To me, she said, “We’ll talk about my website later.”

  She left.

  “I’ll need you to fill out this form,” Gregoire said.

  “Okay,” I said, trying not to sound too deflated. “Is she also in the class?”

  “Who? Oh, Ana?” Gregoire shook his head. “She’s in advanced study. That’s our performance team. You’re in beginners.”

  “Umm . . .” My face heated up. “How long does it take before you get to advanced study?”

  Now Gregoire really looked at me, as if taking me in for the first time. “You’re Hispanic, aren’t you? Got Latin roots?”

  I blinked. I get my looks from Mom’s side, but people don’t usually straight up blurt it out like that. Not white people. They tend to dance around it. (“Where are you from? I mean, originally. And your family, where are they from?”)

  “My mother was from Cuba,” I said.

  “Great,” he said. “So you’ve been dancing since you were little.”

  I shifted uncomfortably. “Not exactly.”

  Gregoire looked disappointed, as if that was the wrong answer.

  Maybe it was. I always told people I was Cuban—but in our home, you didn’t mention Cuba unless you wanted to hear a diatribe. “That communist comemierda screwed up our country,” Mom had said. “I don’t want you to waste your life hating him. We’re Americans now.”

  Mom had come to the United States on a boat during the Mariel exodus of 1980, when she was eighteen. The rest of her family had stayed in Cuba. Mom didn’t talk to them and didn’t talk about them, not even when I asked questions. I only knew that something had happened to her, back in Havana, something that made her want to forget. The only connection she’d maintained with the island had been her salsa collection and a few books—Del Monte, Villaverde, Martí. Pre-Revolution, all of them.

  Naturally, Mom’s refusal to talk about Cuba had made me a fanatic about it. For a while in ninth grade I’d watched every movie, read every book about it that I could get my hands on. Castro’s Revolution, Hemingway’s submarine hunts, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Special Period, blogs like Generación Y and Here is Havana, anything. But it was intellectual knowledge, all of it, and it would help me little on the dance floor.

  “So about that advanced team?” I asked.

  Gregoire shrugged. “It takes most people a few years to get there.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Protip: when you find yourself saying okay to years of hard work, that’s life telling you something.

  This wasn’t even about Ana, not really. I wanted to dance with her, yes—but not simply because I was attracted to her. I wanted to experience what she had, that evening with Gregoire. I’d seen snatches of their dance in my dreams.

  The beginners’ class had twelve girls and seven guys. Most were teens, the oldest in her early twenties. All white kids, except for two black girls and me.

  Everyone else seemed to have arrived with friends and chatted among themselves. I stood off to the side and circled my knees as in PE class—which was my sole prior exposure to any sort of organized exercise. I might have convinced myself I looked like I knew what I was doing, except the mirror told me I looked like a bony kid in sweatpants too big for him.

  “Welcome to Chévere.” Gregoire paced the front of the class with his hands behind his back. “We dance Cuban salsa—the dance called casino, after the Casino Deportivo social clubs in Cuba. Everyone else in this town dances New York style. What we can’t make up in numbers, we make up in quality. We won’t start you off with flashy moves and fancy patterns. You will stay in this beginners’ class until you’ve learned the basics.” Gregoire stopped to face us, hands on his hips. “A dancer without basics is a baboon.”

  It seemed to me that Gregoire had watched too many war movies—the sort featuring a grizzled old drill sergeant.

  He put music on. I recognized the song, “Malditos Celos,” a slow tune by Manolito Simonet. My hands tapped out the tumbao beat on my hips. My knees trembled on the verge of motion.

  “First, we listen,” Gregoire said.

  Huh.

  He drew the rhythmic structure of salsa on the mirror with a marker. He explained where the phrase began, where the drums came in and where the bell rang, and what the bass played. He had us close our eyes and tap our foot on the 1 beat, the beat on which we would begin to dance.

  I took my first salsa steps twenty minutes into the class. It was the basic back-and-forth step I’d watched the other class practice with disdain.

  We spent the next half hour on that step, plus a side-to-side variation.

  “Transfer your weight!” Gregoire yelled over the music, and then he’d come up behind you to give you a nudge. “Listen to the beat!” he’d say, accompanied by a loud clap of his hands right in your ear. Or he’d cry “Don’t bounce!” and do a little jerky pantomime of our dancing prowess.

  Toward the end of class, we did ten minutes in couples. I ended up with a tall blond girl who moved in strange, tilting steps, like she was constantly about to stumble. I took her hand and put my other hand on her back, as Gregoire showed us, and tried to lead her in the basic step.

  The experience felt about as graceful as one of those county fair three-legged races. A quick glance at the mirror assured me this was, in fact, an accurate description. The girl’s scowl told me she agreed and that she wasn’t to blame.

  Suffice to say, I finished the class somewhat dispirited. I wasn’t the only one. I heard some other kids talk about not coming back. “I signed up to have fun, not to get bored out of my skull,” muttered the blond girl I’d danced with. I wasn’t ready to give up myself—I could stand a little boredom if it meant I might get good at this. But I did wonder if Gregoire the drill sergeant was the right teacher for me.

  I ran into Ana on the way out.

  What? It’s true. I ran into her because I lingered by the bulletin board for ten minutes—pretending to browse flyers until she came downstairs.

  She was breathing hard, a sheen of sweat on her face, her dark hair in disarray. I decided to pass by as she drank from the wall fountain.

  “Hey, Ana.”

  She straightened, wiped her mouth. “Hey, Rick. Qué hay? How was your first class?”

  I shrugged. “Gregoire takes this basics thing seriously.”

  “I know, right? So awesome.”

  I schooled my face into the appropriate expression of agreement. “Yes. Awesome.”

  “That’s what I love about this place,” Ana said. “Gregoire doesn’t really need the money, so he doesn’t worry about losing students.”

  “I see.” Specifically, I saw that it was a strange way to run a school.

  “That’s what they don’t get, the people who leave,” Ana said. “This is the fastest way to learn. Other schools, they turn out people who dance for years and do all this flashy stuff, and still they’re bad. Like, en candela. But here—here you get good or you quit.”

  Had Gregoire said this stuff, I might have brushed it off. Ana spoke with an excitement that made my heart speed up.

  I was going to learn my basics. I was going to get good faster than anybody Ana had ever met.

  “Well, uh,” I said instead. “So what kind of website do you want? A dance blog?”

  If you’re going to brag, best stick to things you’ve already accomplished.

  “A portfol
io,” Ana said. “For my films.”

  “Films?”

  “I’m a filmmaker,” Ana said, with simple conviction—not I’m going to be a filmmaker, not I want to be a filmmaker, but I am a filmmaker.

  “Huh,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “You mean to say, why didn’t you see that when you stalked me online?”

  “Umm . . .”

  Ana laughed. “Clearly I need that website.”

  “Clearly,” I said.

  On which graceful note I fled the conversation.

  Dad finally noticed my new hobby—and he wasn’t thrilled.

  We live in Peter Cooper Village. Our building is a redbrick housing project-turned-overpriced apartment block near First Avenue and Twentieth Street in Manhattan. We can only afford it because of rent control—Dad has lived here for all thirty years of his career as a Metro-North ticket puncher.

  The place has the sound isolation of a matchbox.

  I blasted Charanga Habanera from my speakers and practiced torso isolations while doing math homework. I practiced my basic step at 1:00 a.m. when I couldn’t sleep. I spun in place while watching Breaking Bad reruns—round and round and round again, until my world swayed like Jesse Pinkman’s.

  Dad’s a tolerant kind of guy. His motto is live and let live (although he hadn’t been so good at the first part since Mom’s passing). But when I lost my balance and toppled over my bookcase one afternoon a couple of weeks in, he finally spoke up.

  “Don’t you think you’re taking this dance thing too seriously?” he asked, after we’d picked up the collected volumes of Ex Machina and Sandman.

  “You’ve got to practice the basics,” I told him. “It’s the fastest way to learn.”

  “When did you last watch a movie?” Dad asked. “Did you see that new one, what’s it called, with the robots? You used to really like those.”

  “Dancing feels like nothing else,” I said.

  “Shouldn’t you update your site?” Dad asked. “The last Catfestation was in January.”

  I winced. The word “Catfestation” should never pass a father’s lips. Spoken with Dad’s German accent, it sounded more like a venereal disease.