by Jock Soto
Then one day my roommate Jefferson asked me to go have lunch with him. We went to Vinny’s Pizza on Amsterdam, where the pizza was both excellent and cheap, and as we were eating Jefferson launched into what he has since referred to as “The Talk.” (As in, “Remember when I took you out for some pizza and ‘The Talk,’ Jock?”)
“I know they’ve been hitting on you, Jock, and I feel like you’re starting to go the other way,” Jefferson said, breaking the ice about halfway through our lunch. I smiled and took a bite of pizza. “You don’t have to let this happen—you have a choice, you know,” Jefferson continued. I smiled and took a sip of Coke. “You don’t want to go the other way, do you, Jock?” Jefferson asked. “I mean, if you do that’s fine. That’s your business. But I don’t want you to get pushed into something you don’t actually want. It’s okay to say no to people. Do you want to go the other way, Jock?” I smiled again, but still said nothing.
I never gave Jefferson answers to his questions that day, but I think our discussion helped me answer the same questions for myself. Yes, I was “going the other way,” as he had put it. I was attracted to men, not women. Somehow I had learned this truth—or had learned how to acknowledge it to myself in a calm and straightforward way—in this simple one-sided conversation with my trusted friend. And I had discovered something else, too. I had discovered the power and comfort and safety that can come with saying nothing. I had found a lovely little refuge in this wild New York world that I had landed in so suddenly—a refuge called silence.
I did not have a normal family home life, or a normal teenage school life in New York. But I did have two reliable platforms for stabilizing my existence: I could dance, and I could keep quiet. And I was pretty good at both.
A Little Hamburger Helper and My Friends
GROWING TEENAGE BOYS are notorious for having large appetites, but growing teenage boys who dance all day take the art of hoovering food to a new level. I witness this firsthand every day when my young students at the SAB file into the cafeteria for their lunch. Thirty years ago, when I was a student at SAB, we had no dorms and no cafeteria—which meant my roommates and I had to shop and cook for ourselves on our very meager budgets. We stuck to basics, but over time we developed our own signature touches for our communal meals—sausage with Hamburger Helper, crumbled Ruffles potato chips atop tuna casserole, or big chunks of the cheapest cheddar we could find stirred in to create cheesy land mines in our spaghetti casseroles.
Even though I am allegedly a true grown-up now instead of an accidental adult, I sometimes feel more like an accidental adolescent. After all, I am around impossibly young people all day. When I get a craving for one of the simple but satisfying meals of my youth, I put on my workout clothes and some good seventies or eighties music and make this updated version of my old standby.
The Accidental Adolescent’s Grown-up Version of Hamburger Helper
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SERVES 8
Salt
10 links sweet and spicy sausage, 5 of each, removed from casings (about 1¾ pounds)
1 large white onion, diced
5 cloves garlic, finely diced
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 12-ounce can diced tomatoes
1 10¾-ounce can condensed cream of potato soup
Pepper
1-pound box dried pasta (bow tie, or farfalle, pasta is what I use)
½ to 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese (store-bought, grated is fine)
Put a large pot of water on to boil for the pasta, and salt it generously.
Brown your sausage in a large pot or pan, breaking it up so that it becomes ground meat. Add your onion, garlic, and oregano and cook for about 5 to 10 minutes on high heat, depending on your stove. Keep watch and stir regularly so your ingredients don’t stick to the bottom of the pan. Add the tomatoes and bring the mixture a boil; then turn the heat down to medium. Cook for about 10 minutes more, and then add your cream of potato soup and cover partially. (This is when I take out a potato masher and squash the ingredients, so that everything becomes a uniform size.) Cook for another 10 minutes and add salt and pepper to taste. At this point you can reduce the heat to low and let the meat sauce simmer while you prepare your pasta.
When your water has come to rolling boil, throw the pasta in and cook for two minutes less than the directions on the box recommend, so that the pasta is very al dente. Turn off the heat. Remove the pasta from the boiling water with a slotted spoon and put it directly into the sauce.
If the mixture is looking too thick, ladle in some of the pasta water to get the desired texture. Add a handful of Parmesan cheese and stir. I like a lot of cheese and usually keep going until I am happy with the gooeyness of it all. When the dish is to your liking, take it to the table and serve with some Italian bread and extra Parmesan on the side.
CHAPTER EIGHT
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First Love, First Job, First Trip, First Tiramisu
Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.
—HARRIET VAN HORNE
The first time I noticed the handsome blond man staring across the dance studio in my general direction I looked over my right shoulder to see who was behind me. No one. When I looked across the room again he was still standing there, leaning against the piano, staring—so I looked over my left shoulder to check out who the lucky person was. No one. Then my jaw dropped in disbelief. I blushed. Me?
He smiled.
I couldn’t believe it. I had seen Ulrik in our advanced men’s class on several occasions in the last few weeks, and I had developed a raging teenage crush from a distance. He was Danish, a former dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet whom Peter Martins had brought in to join the NYCB corps de ballet. He was nine years older than I, with intense bright blue eyes. We barely spoke to each other, but in the few words we did exchange his elegant accent seemed to imply that here was a man of intelligence, humor, sophistication, and charm. Basically, I was a goner from the start.
Mutual admiration was all that Ulrik and I shared at first. There were certain obstacles blocking anything else. For one thing, I was still fifteen and I had no idea what “being in love” entailed in practical terms. What did one actually do, besides gawk and sigh? And then there was the fact that Ulrik was involved with another man—a rather prominent man in the ballet world. For me it was thrilling enough that we could be around each other, in each other’s orbit for a part of the day. In ballet classes back then, between the barre and center portions of our exercises, everybody would take out their cigarettes and smoke. Stanley Williams would light up his pipe and then everyone would get their nicotine fix. (This would never, ever happen now.) Whenever he came to take our men’s class, Ulrik and I would stare at each other all through the class and all through the breaks, and my heart would always idle at a higher speed; the looks and glances, the fleeting touches and occasional passing remarks that we shared all served to stoke the fire.
It was spring and I thought I might be falling in love—and to make things perfect, I seemed to be dancing more than ever. Recently Peter Martins—who was already multitasking as one of the company’s most admired principal dancers and as an up-and-coming choreographer in his own right—had been named ballet master with Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and John Taras. One day Peter called me into a studio with my fellow SAB student Katrina Killian (who would become a particular favorite of Balanchine’s before long) and began working with us. That was how I discovered that Peter had decided to choreograph a new interpretation of the ballet The Magic Flute on me and Katrina. (To choreograph a ballet “on” a dancer—that is, to create a work with and for a specific artist—is a peculiar idiom of the ballet world. Strange as it may sound to the lay ear, to a seasoned dancer it sounds even stranger to use any other preposition.) I was excited for all sorts of reasons, professional and personal. Peter was an object of worship among most of us students, and to work closely with him was everyone’s dream. I had been cast in the role
of Luke, the peasant boy who falls in love with Lise, and Katrina and I were scheduled to premiere the ballet for the school’s annual Workshop Performances. Peter’s girlfriend at the time was the brilliant and edgy Heather Watts, and my secret heartthrob, Ulrik, happened to be Peter’s fellow countryman and close friend—so increased proximity to both Heather and Ulrik would be an accidental advantage.
For that same year’s Workshop Performances, in addition to my role in Magic Flute, Suki Schorer had cast me as the male lead for a performance of Balanchine’s La Source, and Joseph Duell had chosen me for a pas de trois in his new ballet La Création du Monde. Peter’s Magic Flute was a full-blown “story” ballet with very intricate and fast partnering and its own elaborate set, while Duell’s piece was a more modern, jazzy number, with a very retro costume—I remember wearing a unitard with something that resembled macramé strings dangling from the ankles and wrists. The challenges of these dramatically different ballets and the high level of talent and sophistication of the people I was working with were all a little intimidating to me at the time—in so many ways I was still just a young boy from the desert. It makes me laugh to remember how I used to try to field Ulrik’s flirtations when he was in my class and then, in my free time between classes, head over to the Metropolitan Opera House where I would amuse myself by sliding down the railing of the long escalator to the parking lot over and over again, like a ten-year-old kid, until the guard got pissed off and told me to stop.
The Workshop Performances got a lot of press that May, and Anna Kisselgoff of the New York Times singled me out as “a highly talented dancer of magnificent stage presence.” Although the praise gave me a nice warm feeling for a few minutes, I knew that kudos of this sort didn’t mean much in the long run. In ballet you had to prove yourself moment by moment, and every day offered a thousand different opportunities to fail. I was painfully aware of what a primitive I was, compared to almost everyone around me, and I was particularly self-conscious about not having the classic ballet dancer’s tall, lean build. I was young and green, but I was also incredibly determined. My hope was that if I listened and watched carefully, kept quiet, threw my heart into everything I did, and kept pushing myself with new challenges, I could get better.
One of my most exciting challenges came later that June when Balanchine staged a special Tchaikovsky Festival in honor of the Russian composer, with ten days of performances featuring his music in repertory ballets as well as in twelve new works by Balanchine, Duell, Jacques d’Amboise, Peter Martins, Jerome Robbins, and John Taras. As part of a new program of selections from ballets, called Tempo di Valse, Taras was choreographing the waltz from Eugene Onegin on me and seven other students at the school—and we were going to premiere it at the festival. I had just turned sixteen that April, and now—for ten days, anyway—I would be dancing with the NYCB itself, representing the school in real performances for huge audiences.
The stage setting for the Tchaikovsky Festival was designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee and consisted of translucent tubing that was hung and lit in different architectural configurations—in my opinion the tubing was ugly, and it smelled bad to boot. But the festival itself was thrilling, nonetheless. Balanchine had decided that we students dancing Eugene Onegin would close the Tempo di Valse program, which was a way to honor and highlight the school. The ballet that came right before our piece was the “Waltz of the Flowers,” danced by Heather Watts with the corps, and my fellow students and I would stand in the wings in our little outfits, watching, and thinking, “Oh my God. We have to follow this?” Heather brought the house down every night. I mean, literally. She had to bow at least five times. I watched with awe, fascinated by her angular body and her long legs and beautiful feet, and by the exciting combination of precision and abandon she brought to her role. I was smitten—as far as I was concerned, she was a goddess. Anna Kisselgoff must have agreed, because she christened Heather “The Queen of the Festival.”
Dancing in the Tchaikovsky Festival that June was a thrill for me professionally, and it was also the kickoff for considerable excitement in my private life. The barely suppressed romance between Ulrik and me had been getting hotter and hotter, and when the two of us were thrown into backstage evenings together during the Tchaikovsky Festival, the situation reached the boiling point. Ulrik was living in an apartment in SoHo with Julia Gruen, a friend and former SAB student, and one night when he and I were both at a party after the evening’s performances he invited me home with him. I accepted, of course. I blush to think of how naive I was at that stage in my life. I literally had no idea about the mechanics of sex (I think again of my mother when she met my father), but like any good horny teenager, I guess I must have caught on quickly enough. My teenage infatuation with Ulrik was soon a full-blown love affair.
I was already pretty dizzy with all the new developments in my life when, shortly after the Tchaikovsky Festival, I was summoned, along with three other dancers—Espen Giljane, Sabrina Pillars, and Lisa Jackson—to take a company class with George Balanchine. None of us had any idea why we had been called in, but I remember how excited I was just to be in the big rehearsal studio on the fifth floor of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center (now renamed the David H. Koch Theater), where so many famous dancers had worked—the same studio where Jerome Robbins and Mr. B himself had choreographed on their dancers. I was standing at the barre, young and eager, feeling closer than ever to realizing the dream I had carried around inside me since I was four. Balanchine was watching me as I did my pliés, the most basic combination, and as he watched he shook his head and said, “No.” I did my pliés again, and again he said, “No.” I tried a third time, and once again he said, “No.” And then he walked away. I was devastated—the truth had been exposed! Obviously I was devoid of all talent. When class was over, ballet mistress Rosemary Dunleavy walked all four of us visiting students down the hall to the elevator in silence. Just as the elevator doors were about to close on us, she congratulated us and announced that Balanchine had invited all four of us to join the NYCB corps de ballet.
That moment when Mr. B invited me to become a dancer with the New York City Ballet will always remain one of the high points of my life. There were no cell phones in those days, so that evening I went to a pay phone in the street to call my parents and give them the news. They sounded excited for me, happy my career seemed to be really taking off, but also preoccupied by things that were going on in their world out west. I remember having a hollow feeling after I hung up the phone. Our conversation had made it so clear to me how different and disconnected our lives had become—there was so much going on in my life that my family didn’t know about and that I wasn’t about to tell them. I could only assume the reverse must also be true. I walked home to my room on the top floor of Edward Villella’s town house in a strange, bittersweet state of mind, feeling incredibly happy and incredibly sad at the same time.
As it turned out, my colleagues and I would be the last four dancers chosen by Balanchine before he died. Even without knowing this, I felt deeply honored by his invitation, and I was determined to prove myself worthy. I worked harder than ever in my own classes and rehearsals, and watched every rehearsal and performance I could, paying particular attention to the way the star couples—Heather Watts and Bart Cook, Darci Kistler and Sean Lavery, Peter Martins and Suzanne Farrell, Patricia McBride and Helgi Tomasson—partnered each other. The smoothness, the complexity of movement, the way the lines between their two bodies blended and through a series of physical actions evoked a magical beauty—that was what I wanted to create someday. I tried to carry my observations back with me to my own work, and gradually I began to feel that I might be at the threshold of understanding ballet on a deeper, more intuitive level. Progress required hours and hours of work, but there were definitely some breakthrough moments for me, both as a dancer and as an observer. I will never forget the performance, for instance, when I “saw” Suzanne Farrell for the first time, in the sense of
truly understanding her extraordinary talent. She was dancing the “Diamonds” pas de deux from Jewels with Peter Martins, and I was standing in the wings, watching. Suzanne was so beautiful and otherworldly I could barely breathe. I wanted to nudge the people around me and ask them if they could believe what they were seeing. Afterward I was still standing in the wings, watching, as all the corps and soloists filed away, leaving Balanchine alone with principal dancers Suzanne and Peter Martins. I often tried to eavesdrop on these little sessions when Balanchine would huddle with the stars of the evening to go over their performance, hoping to learn from his comments. He was leaning in toward Suzanne, looking at her intensely, talking to her. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but a moment later, as he turned and wandered off as if in a dream, it seemed to me that, although Balanchine had created this ballet and seen it many times before, he had been as moved and dazzled by this performance as any member of the audience on that night.
I threw my entire being into what was now my official “profession”—and I immersed myself just as passionately in my love affair with my older boyfriend. Our relationship was not something that I took lightly. I was sixteen, and head-over-heels in love for the first time in the way that only teenagers can be in love. Everything in life felt so charged and exciting, and to the little “Puerto Rican–Indian ballet sissy” from Arizona that still lurked inside me, the world seemed to be expanding at an amazing rate, getting bigger and brighter on every front with every day. That July I traveled with the company to the annual summer season in Saratoga Springs for the first time, and my friend Espen and I, along with Ulrik and another wonderful dancer in the corps named John Bass, stayed together in a house on Saratoga Lake. I rehearsed my heart out all day, and in the downtime between and after rehearsals and performances I hung around the edges of the brilliant and witty older crowd that Ulrik was part of, watching and listening and trying to master their social jargon. On Sundays I was dumbfounded when Ulrik and John Bass whipped through the New York Times crossword puzzle in less than an hour—I couldn’t even get a quarter of the way through Monday’s puzzle, which was the easiest. I was self-conscious about my lack of formal education—the last formal classroom I had been in was my seventh-grade year in California. I listened carefully to the animated conversations all around me, trying to decipher the multilingual puns and one-liners that for the most part flew right over my head. I knew this was not a world I could compete in, so I didn’t try.
