by Jock Soto
There was one of Kiko’s girlfriends whom I was particularly fond of, because she would arrive on horseback and leave her horse tied in the yard while she and Kiko were in Kiko’s bedroom doing God only knows what for hours. While she and Kiko were locked away, I would slip the horse from its halter and climb onto its back and go galloping out across the desert. The horse was very well trained, and I would ride it bareback, steering with its mane. I would race back and forth across the desert—I loved going really fast—and then ride back home and quietly tie up the horse again on our lawn. This is one of several memories that seems almost surreal to me now. I wouldn’t dream of climbing on a horse these days—in fact, I can’t even walk past a horse without thinking it might bite me with its big old teeth or kick me with a back hoof and break my shin. For years while I was dancing with the NYCB I had to avoid potentially dangerous sports like skiing and riding, and somehow, over time, I have convinced myself that I am terrified of horses. But back then, galloping bareback across the desert seemed the most natural thing in the world. It was completely exhilarating. It was freedom.
During those years when I was watching with great curiosity as Kiko juggled his various girlfriends, I never felt the slightest urge for physical interaction with girls myself. Of course, I was still young and probably not feeling definite sexual urges of any kind. But I do remember being fascinated by our babysitter Hortensia’s teenage son when he sat and watched television with us. On hot days, when he took off his shirt, my jaw dropped as I stared at his bare chest and shoulders. I remember sitting near him on the sofa and slowly stretching out the ears and legs of my very large talking Bugs Bunny to make Bugs take up more and more of the empty sofa on my right side, so that I could inch closer and closer to the hunky teenager seated on the sofa to my left. I was only seven or eight at the time, but obviously on some level I already knew I was gay.
Another memory that would support this theory floated back to me recently. It took place on an afternoon when Pop and Kiko weren’t around, and I was sitting on the couch in our living room in Paradise Valley, watching Mom vacuum. Mom was in her early thirties, and for some reason she was wearing a blond wig. Maybe my dad had brought it home for her. I’m not sure why she was wearing the wig, but the blond hair looked very strange against the color of her skin. I was dying to try the wig on myself, to see how I would look with blond hair. (Exactly like my mother, is the answer.) At the time I was obsessed with the movie Funny Girl starring Barbra Streisand, and as soon as Mom removed her wig and set it aside, I grabbed it and disappeared into Kiko’s and my bedroom. I made a bikini top with one towel and used two more towels to create a bustle in the rear and settled the blond wig onto my head. Holding a brush as a microphone, I played the sound track from Funny Girl on the record player, stood in front of the mirror, and began lip-synching to the song “People,” doing my best to imitate Ms. Streisand’s movements and facial expressions. Halfway through my performance, the bedroom door slowly opened, revealing my father’s astonished face. I stopped and stared back at him, just as speechless as he was, blushing to my toes. Not a word was said as he slowly closed the door again. The only sound that could be heard was Ms. Streisand’s voice singing “… are the luckiest people—in the world!”
Even in these early years it must have occurred to my parents that I might be gay—but this was not something we talked about then, or for years to come. I have never sensed the slightest disapproval about my sexuality from my mother’s side of the family, and just recently I learned that in the Navajo culture being gay is considered a special quality, indicating that a person is more evolved spiritually than others. Clearly the same is not true in the Puerto Rican culture of my father’s heritage. I sensed intense, if unspoken, disapproval from my father about my sexuality when I was growing up. As recently as 2005, when my parents and I visited my Puerto Rican grandparents in their shack in the middle of the slums of Puerto Rico, as part of our research for Water Flowing Together, I was shocked to discover that Pop had never told Grandma Margo and Don Lolo that I was gay. It was the first time they had seen me since I was a young kid, and they kept asking me why I didn’t have a family yet. I kept waiting for Pop to explain—but he never said a thing.
Another topic that was never discussed in our house during my Paradise Valley years was where my father disappeared to every Saturday night. Almost every week during the years when I was ages five to ten, in the late afternoon or early evening on Saturdays, my father would start his weekly ritual. He would shower and shave and put on his nicest clothes, whistling and singing all the while, and then dab a little fragrant cologne on his cheeks. Throughout these ablutions my mother and Kiko and I would snuggle together on the sofa, watching Pop get himself all snappy, and getting ready for our own evening of watching television together. Sometimes, after he had dressed but before putting his shoes and socks on, my father would call my mother over and she would kneel down and clip his toenails for him. When he was all dressed and groomed, Pop would say good-bye and leave. This was the ritual every weekend, and to Kiko and me it seemed to be a pretty happy ritual, especially since every Sunday when Pop came home again we would all pile into his 1965 white Cadillac convertible with the ruby-red interior and go on a big family picnic. We would head out into the desert with the top down and the wind blowing through our hair. Kiko and I would sip Cokes in the backseat and sing along to the Eagles at top volume when it was our turn to pick the music, while Mom and Pop drank their tomato-juice-and-beer in the front seat. Pop would salsa dance with the steering wheel when it was his turn; Mom, seated beside him and wearing her trademark scarf and wide-brimmed hat and oversize sunglasses, resembled a Native American Audrey Hepburn. We would cruise across the hot desert toward Oak Creek Canyon, where we would pick a roadside picnic spot at random—it didn’t really matter where we stopped. The point was the four of us were all there together, on a Sunday family picnic adventure.
As far as I knew, every pop in Arizona left home on Saturday night and then came home on Sunday to take his family on a splendid picnic. At the time it would never have occurred to me that my father was going to spend the night with another woman, and even now, as I write this I can’t understand how my mother could abide such behavior for as many years as she did. The whole situation came to an ugly head one Christmas Day when I was ten. Kiko and I were out riding our bicycles around Paradise Valley when we saw our father’s Cadillac cruising toward us. Everyone in our neighborhood knew his car—Pop was so proud of it, and we were always proud, too, whenever he drove up in it to pick us up from school. Now he was approaching us in his fabulous car, and as he came to a stop we peered inside.
“Say hello to your brother Charles,” my father said as he pointed to a little boy sitting next to him. Kiko and I looked at each other. We both knew about our half brother Mac Joe from Philadelphia, because he had come to stay with us briefly a few years earlier. He was a strange boy who one day during his visit had wrapped his arms around me and sucked on my neck in order, I now understand, to give me a hickey. But the boy in the car was not Mac Joe. “That’s not our brother,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. And then Pop took off, heading for our house.
Kiko and I sped home as fast as we could on our bikes, and got there just in time to see Pop and the boy called Charles getting back into the car. It had been only a couple of minutes. As they drove off, we ran in to find our mother, but she wasn’t in the house. We started racing around the neighborhood, shouting her name, desperate to find her. After searching and searching, we finally found Mom. She was sitting, crying, in an empty canal that handled the overflow from flash floods and heavy rains.
“How could he do this?” she asked. “How could he do this to me?” I felt like someone had put a knife right through me—I couldn’t stand to see my mother cry. Eventually Kiko and I calmed Mom down. We hugged her and we talked to her and we took her home. I was too young to understand exactly what had happened. But as I fell asleep that night there w
as one thing I knew for sure: my father had hurt my mother. He had made her cry. And I was furious with him, and with the little Christmas-surprise boy named Charles.
Charles was about five when my father brought him home to meet us that Christmas, and he did not visit our Paradise Valley home ever again. I suppose Mom and Pop must have worked something out. I have a vague memory that Mom said she was going to take Kiko and me and divorce Pop—and that then Pop realized he couldn’t live without my mother, so he stopped seeing the other woman. This seems a plausible enough script, whether or not it actually happened.
As I write this I am haunted by the vision of my mother kneeling to trim my father’s toenails so that he can go spend the night with another woman. But I am also haunted by a scene that occurred not so many years ago, when I flew out to visit my parents in Gallup, New Mexico. Kiko had picked me up at the airport, and as we were driving to the trailer off Route 66 where Mom and Pop were living at the time, he turned to me and asked if Mom had warned me that Charles—the little Christmas-surprise boy—would be at the trailer. She had not. I was incredulous, but sure enough when we got to the trailer, there he was. My reaction was not particularly nice. When Kiko got out of our car I stayed put and rolled up all the windows and locked all the doors. I was a grown man, and so was Charles—but I acted as if I were still a ten-year-old boy who was furious at a five-year-old boy who had arrived unannounced on Christmas Day and made his mother cry.
My father and Kiko and Charles were all skulking around outside the trailer, glancing at me nervously. They knew I was upset. My mother was waving to me, gesturing for me to get out of the car. I wouldn’t budge. She walked over and knocked on the window and asked me to roll it down. At first I resisted, but when I finally opened the window I looked Mom in the eye and asked her how she could stand this. Mom looked right back at me and said, “All has been forgiven, Jock. He’s part of the family now.” I stared at her in disbelief. Then I followed her into the trailer, still furious but thinking that my mother must be the strongest woman in the world, and a saint.
As it turned out, Charles had been living with my parents in their trailer that year, at my mother’s insistence. My mother had forgiven my father and had accepted Charles into her home with the same warm and loving embrace she extended to everyone, because it would have offended her ideals of harmony and humanity to do anything else. I could not summon the same largesse of spirit within myself at the time, but even from beyond the grave Mom continues to teach me things—the same way she said she herself was always taught as a young girl on the reservation: by example. New lessons come from her all the time, and over the last few years I have come to understand that Mom is right about Charles. He is part of our family, and family is one of the most important things in life. These days when I consider Charles’s situation, I feel sorry for him. Truly, none of this was his fault. I have always had a father, flawed as he may be, and so has my brother, Kiko. Poor Charles never really had a father. Since my mother passed away Kiko and I have been making a greater effort to keep in touch with our half brother Charles, and he often joins us when we get together with my—and his—father. I know Mom, wherever she is, must be watching and smiling, wondering what she should teach us next.
The Happy Family Picnic
ON SUNDAY MORNINGS when I was young my mother would get up early, carefully apply her makeup, and then head to the kitchen to put together our family picnic. The menu varied, but my favorite entrées were always chicken-cheese-alfalfa-sprout sandwiches (on white bread with tons of mayonnaise) and Mom’s special “barbecued” chicken, which she actually cooked in a casserole in the oven. The chicken can also be “barbecued” on the stovetop or in a Crock-Pot if you don’t have an oven.
One of the wonderful things about picnics is they will work just about anywhere. You need only transport a tasty meal to a place where you don’t normally eat—it could be your living room floor—and the rest is all attitude. For my brother, Kiko, and me, sitting in the backseat of my father’s 1965 Cadillac convertible with the top down and the wind blowing through our hair on our way to a family picnic was about as good as life got.
Mom’s Stove-Top BBQ Chicken
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SERVES 10
8 chicken thighs, bone in, with skin
8 chicken legs, bone in, with skin
2 whole chicken breasts, bone in, with skin, each breast halved and quartered
1 large Spanish onion, finely chopped
¾ cup chicken broth
Salt and pepper
3 cups honey-mustard barbecue sauce
Heat the oven to 350 degrees.
Place the chicken and onions in a large casserole dish, and pour in the broth. Add salt and pepper to taste. Mix these with your hands until everything is coated.
Cover the casserole dish with aluminum foil, and place in the oven to bake. After 45 minutes, add the barbecue sauce and toss to coat the chicken evenly. Turn the oven up to 475 degrees, and bake without the foil for another 10 to 15 minutes, or until the chicken starts to dry a bit. Keep an eye on it to prevent it from drying too much—every oven is different. Remove from the oven and cool for 10 minutes, covered loosely with foil, before serving.
This is delicious served hot, lukewarm, or cold—but make sure you have plenty of napkins.
CHAPTER SIX
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Losing Arizona
Make something beautiful of your life.
—ABRAHAM VERGHESE, CUTTING FOR STONE
By the time I was nine or ten the world of ballet at large and my own weekly ballet classes had become an alternate reality for me, a place where I could hide and dream. I still acted out my role as just another neighborhood kid in the desert community where I lived, but I also lived another, more exciting, life inside the small studio of the Phoenix School of Ballet. I was attending more and more classes, which meant spending more time waiting to be picked up. I can remember spending much of that idle time locked in the school’s one and only dressing room, where I would try on various items from the lost-and-found bin and dance all around in the borrowed outfits, becoming different characters. When people came banging on the door—“Let us in! We need to change!”—I would quickly strip and get back in my own clothes and open the door and exit as nonchalantly as possible.
Stories of a bigger ballet world beyond my little Arizona school drifted back to me and I hoarded every detail and dreamed of becoming part of that world someday. Three of Isabel and Kelly’s children—Leslie, Ethan, and Elizabeth—were studying ballet in New York, and there was huge excitement in our school when rumors surfaced that Leslie might be cast in a film, dancing with Mikhail Baryshnikov, who had recently defected from Russia. (She did get the part, and in fact was nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Turning Point, a film I must have watched a hundred times in the year or so after it came out.) I had seen news coverage and clips of Baryshnikov on the television, and I wanted desperately to get an autographed picture of him. My mother found out where to send mail for Baryshnikov so that I could write a letter to him—and he actually sent me an autographed picture all the way to Arizona. (I still have that autographed photo, but I have never told Misha about it. When he and I see each other these days he says, “Hi, old man,” and I say, “Hi, older man.”)
During my studies at his ballet school, Kelly Brown had choreographed some short pieces for me, and when I was eleven he decided to choreograph the annual Christmas show for me and a little girl from the school. The ballet started with the two of us sleeping. (I think Kelly was trying to make a little Nutcracker-type thing without copying it.) When we awoke, there was Santa Claus, and a whole flurry of little dancing tree ornaments. The show ended up getting some attention, and an article in the local newspaper described me as “an eleven-year-old phenomenon.” Well, I was one of a handful of boys dancing in Arizona—so of course they thought I was a phenomenon! The buzz brought the local TV station in to do a little story—and that was the end of my reput
ation.
When I walked into my homeroom at school the next morning, there on the chalkboard, in huge block letters, were the words JOCK IS A SISSY. I read them, and then—like any good sissy—I turned around and ran all the way home, crying. Children can be so cruel, and from then on my schoolmates teased me mercilessly, calling me “Ballet-Sissy” and “Gay Boy.” Kiko did his best to protect me, but the news about my ballet studies—which my parents had deliberately tried to keep under wraps—was out. In a defensive strategy, I made friends with the only African American girl at our school, who was also getting picked on a lot, and another little boy who was unpopular. We three losers hung out together and tried to protect one another.
That was the unfortunate fallout from my Christmas performance. A happier result came when a talent scout saw the performance and was impressed by what she considered to be my natural abilities and stage presence. She came backstage and took my parents aside and told them that I should go to New York City and audition for the School of American Ballet and work with George Balanchine. Once again my mother took my ballet future seriously enough to follow through—in fact the next day she called SAB and set up an audition for me. At the time I had never heard of the New York City Ballet, and I had no idea who George Balanchine was. The American Ballet Theatre was the dance company that seemed to always be in the press in those days, and I just assumed that the School of American Ballet must be their school. But none of these details mattered to me—I was excited beyond belief when my mother announced that she and my father had scraped together some money and that she and I were going to fly to New York, where I would be auditioning at a new ballet school.
