Every Step You Take

by Jock Soto

  I was devastated, and I arrived at my rehearsal for Symphony in Three Movements a blubbering wreck. I was so upset I couldn’t dance. My career was over, I explained to Peter and ballet mistress Rosemary Dunleavy between my sobs. I had pissed Helgi off—really, really pissed him off—and he had kicked me out of his ballet.

  Peter and Rosemary looked at each other and then both tried to calm me. “Let it go,” they said. “Everything will be okay. Just let it go.” At that moment it seemed impossible that I would ever recover from the incident—professionally or personally. But of course I did—and rather quickly. I danced my debut in Symphony in Three Movements with Maria that night, and danced it well. The New York Times compared my “projection of volume” to that of Edward Villella and then added: “Mr. Soto made every small step important.” The praise did wonders to soothe my upset feelings at being booted from Helgi’s ballet, and as I lifted my chin and turned my back on the matter, a part of me—the rejected part—withdrew and grew a protective layer of tough skin. I was learning one of the most crucial skills for any professional dancer: you can get upset, but never let it show.

  For everyone at the New York City Ballet the work ethic was always incredibly intense—we were dancing, dancing, dancing from the moment we got up until the final curtain at 11 p.m. But along with this hard work there was plenty of play, and at times life felt impossibly exotic to me. The performances were quite magical in themselves, and over the course of each year there was also the thrill of being part of a roving gypsy band that moved en masse from place to place. That July we went to Saratoga for our annual summer session, and that August the entire company boarded a European-bound jet for a foreign tour that would include two weeks each in London, Copenhagen, and Paris. Our collective spirits were soaring as we took off, and the seven-hour flight that followed was like a cross between the movies Airplane and Animal House—I remember about two-thirds of the way through our journey the flight attendant got on the intercom and announced: “Will the New York City Ballet please get back in their seats and remain quiet for the remainder of the flight?”

  It was my first European tour with the company, and it was wonderful. We danced our way across the stages of Europe, and when we weren’t dancing we ate and drank our way through each city we visited. I was trying to keep up with Ulrik and our friends, all of whom were so much more experienced and well traveled than I, and one night in Paris my insecurities about myself and about Ulrik’s affections got to me and I lost my composure. We were at a black-tie party for the company that was hosted at the famous restaurant Maxim’s, and I was sipping a glass of white wine while chatting with a dancer named Liz. When I looked across the room, I saw Ulrik and another dancer sitting on a sofa in quiet conversation, and it was instantly clear to me that something was going on between them. Jealousy and fury rose volcanically inside me. I handed my wine to Liz, strode across the room, and, without saying a word, turned the sofa holding the two-timing Ulrik and the offending dancer upside down. Then I stomped off into the Paris night. It was a pretty adolescent performance on my part—but then, I was an adolescent. And, true to my age, I quickly forgot about the upset, and Ulrik and I sailed on through the rest of the trip as if nothing had happened.

  Back in New York for the fall season after our European tour, we all hit the ground running and I had little time to brood over Ulrik’s possible infidelity. A big thrill came when I was asked to replace the injured Bart Cook and partner Heather in the “Rubies” section of Balanchine’s Jewels—the very same passage of the ballet that had caught my eye on The Ed Sullivan Show so many years ago. Every time I see Jewels it amazes me that Balanchine could build such energy and movement and intense emotion into a ballet that has no story line proper, and could use the abstract concept of three different precious stones to express so much about life and dance. That fall I also partnered Heather in the second movement of Symphony in C for the first time, and when Nutcracker season rolled around I was cast as the Leading Hot Chocolate. “Leading Hot Chocolate” is not something many people would put on a résumé, but in our little world inside Balanchine’s infinite world, every step you took was important.

  Nutcracker season that year was significant for everyone in the company for another reason. On the night that marked the one hundredth performance of Balanchine’s ballet, we all watched Peter Martins give his final performance as a dancer, as the Cavalier to Suzanne Farrell’s Sugar Plum Fairy. I remember it was such an emotional moment, standing backstage after the performance, waiting to go to Peter’s retirement party, dressed in my tuxedo with my little snap-on bow tie. Peter was a beautiful dancer, and we were never going to see him dance again. He was still young—it seemed almost criminal. But with Balanchine gone, Peter was just too busy to dance. I couldn’t imagine not dancing, and as I glanced over at Peter, wondering how he could possibly be handling this, I saw that he was laughing. “Did you see that?” he asked, with a big grin. “Jesus! I had to save Suzanne from that crazy turn! Did you see?” Watching him, you would never have guessed that there was anything unusual about this particular night, or that anything special was going on about which he might have cared. As usual, Peter was the ultimate professional—a smooth, self-effacing, disciplined performer, just one of many participants in a seamless presentation of art. I thought for a moment about the day when my own retirement would eventually come and wondered if I would be able to handle myself with as much dignity and grace. But that horrifying, almost unthinkable event seemed impossibly far away—would I even live long enough to see it? Best not to think about such things, I told myself, as I straightened my tie and headed off to Peter’s party. Best to just dance.

  A Soto Variation on a Balanchine Classic

  BALANCHINE’S DEATH IN 1983 was a terrible loss for the whole world, and over the years there have been many ways in which his admirers have honored his memory. I heard a new one recently when retired NYCB-dancer Karin von Aroldingen told me that she keeps a piece of Balanchine’s last birthday cake in her freezer and eats a little bite of it each year on his birthday. Karin described how she, Mr. B, and Mr. B’s fourth wife, Tanaquil le Clercq, would often cook meals together, and she kindly lent me a copy of The Ballet Cook Book, a compendium of recipes from famous dancers that Tanny put together in 1966.

  In her book Tanny opens the section that presents her husband’s recipes with his description of his ideal sandwich: “Take one half of an un-toasted Thomas’ English muffin, cover it generously with sweet butter, say about a quarter of an inch, spread a layer of excellent black caviar over the butter, at least one inch thick, and cover with the other half of the muffin. If you can’t afford lots of caviar, better to forget the whole thing.”

  Reading about Mr. Balanchine’s special caviar sandwich made me hungry for an alternate version—a more affordable (and less caloric) item than Balanchine’s, on a bagel instead of an English muffin—that Luis and I often have as a treat on New Year’s Day. One evening as Luis and I were enjoying our caviar-topped bagels and browsing through The Ballet Cook Book, we flipped to the book’s inside front cover and discovered an inscription, from Tanny to Mr. B: “Christmas 1967 To George—with all my love, and gratitude for helping me so much with this book. T.” We gasped. It was thrilling to imagine that on a Christmas Day long ago, Tanaquil le Clercq presented her husband, George Balanchine, with this very book. I wonder what they ate for dinner that night.

  New Year’s Day Bagel-and-Caviar Treat

  ______

  SERVES I SELFISH, GREEDY PERSON

  This sublime sandwich needn’t be reserved for New Year’s Day. I once tore my calf during a rehearsal and came home in one of those hideous boots that makes you look like you have injured yourself beyond repair. I was quite upset, because it felt like it was about the one hundredth time this had happened. As I lay in bed, feeling sorry for myself, Luis surprised me with this gorgeous delight.

  1 sesame bagel, toasted

  Cream cheese

  Loxr />
  Red onion slices

  Caviar!

  Toast your bagel, and then spread cream cheese on it. Layer on your lox and red onion slices. Then top it with as much caviar as possible.

  If someone asks for a bite, refuse, saying, “Go get your own, buddy!” A nice glass of Veuve Clicquot is a must. Cheers!

  CHAPTER TEN

  ______

  The Enigma of Arrival

  Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

  —MAYA ANGELOU

  When I think back on my first decade of living alone in New York, I am saddened to realize how little I saw or even talked to members of my family during those years. I had thrown myself into my dancing and embraced my life with my new NYCB family with a single-minded intensity, and there were long periods when I didn’t even know where my parents and my brother were living. Communication between us was complicated by the fact that they were still constantly on the move—I vaguely remember my parents living in various locations in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, and Texas during this period—as well as by the hit-or-miss nature of pay-phone-to-pay-phone calls in a pre–cell phone era. Neither I nor my parents could afford the cost of plane tickets for visits, and in my case a performance schedule made any non-work-related travel impossible anyway. Even the traditional holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas were off-limits.

  I do remember when my brother enlisted in the navy in 1981, at age eighteen, and was stationed in Guam for four years. Kiko and I have since joked about the fact that in what he intended as an act of rebellion during his “I hate my father” period, Kiko wound up doing exactly what our father, angry with his father, had done at about the same age. In 1986, Kiko got married to his first wife in San Diego. I hadn’t seen Kiko since my family had left me in New York, but I still could not make it to the wedding. My nephew Bryce was born in March of 1987—and it was I who suggested his name, inspired by my friend the painter Brice Marden, though Kiko revised the spelling slightly. It wasn’t until 1991, when I was dancing in San Diego, that I finally got to enjoy a brief visit with Kiko and meet his son Bryce and his wife, who was pregnant again. My nephew Trevor was born that July. Sadly, these are the only major family milestones that I can identify for that decade.

  The physical distance between my family and me during these years was compounded, of course, by the widening gap between the kinds of lives we were leading. I was, by this time, a fully launched young homosexual, living my life on my own terms in Manhattan. I had never discussed my sexuality with my parents, and I had no desire to do so. Our worlds were just too different, and I knew my father, at least, would certainly not want to have that conversation. During my infrequent and brief telephone conversations with my parents I carefully steered clear of any discussion of my personal life. This was easy enough with my father, since our talks usually lasted a maximum of ten seconds. In conversations with my mother, both of us were careful to stick to safe topics—I’d tell her what I was dancing and she would give me a basic update on family members. When I got off the phone I would heave a sigh of relief, happy to know that I had dodged any exchange of real information with my parents and could now return to my emotionally charged but repressed and uncommunicative life with my two-timing older boyfriend and my round-the-clock adventures with my exotic, dysfunctional surrogate family in New York.

  Thinking back, I sometimes wonder how any of us managed to survive that period of our lives. We were all so young, and our lives were unfolding at such a fast and relentless pace, seesawing between two very different worlds in a strange counterpoint of discipline and dissolution. My hours and hours of daily rehearsals and high-pressure evening performances for NYCB all fell within the beautiful, precise, polished, classical lines of Balanchine’s world; when we had finished performing and finally exited the “Philip Johnson Cave,” as we sometimes called the New York State Theater, my fellow dancers and I would throw ourselves with equal intensity into our entirely unchoreographed rampages through the dark underworld of the 1980s late-night club scene in New York.

  Heather and I had been dancing together more and more and getting closer and closer as time passed, both on- and offstage, and often she and I would head out into the night together with Ulrik and Peter and a few other good friends. We would usually begin with a dinner somewhere, and then those who felt sufficiently restless and hell-bent would continue on, roving from club to club or party to party, gulping vodka and smoking cigarettes and falling in and out of myriad small dramas and flirtations and fights.

  By this time, Heather and Peter, at least in my mind, had taken on the specific role of surrogate parents within my surrogate family—in fact, to this day Peter refers to me as his “second son,” an honorary status I am so touched and grateful to have been given. But even surrogate families have their rough times, and I have memories of many uncomfortable evenings when I would sit silently through dinner, my stomach in a tense knot, as tempers flared and harsh words flew back and forth across the table. Another source of pain for me during this period was my gradual realization that Ulrik, with whom I was still very much in love, definitely was not the most faithful of lovers. I’m sure my suspicions and my anger about Ulrik’s infidelities were magnified by the innocence and vulnerability of my relative youth, but at the time all I knew was that it hurt. Despite my pain, I couldn’t bring myself to confront Ulrik directly. (Was this perhaps a behavior I had learned from my mother? At least I wasn’t clipping his toenails for him before he went out to cheat on me!) Instead, I kept quiet and let everything build up inside me. For the most part, I managed to keep my composure, at least in public, but on occasion my feelings would flare up suddenly, as they had in Paris, and I would find myself doing strange things I could never have predicted and that still surprise me when I think of them today.

  I remember sitting at a club called the Boy Bar late one night, next to the same dancer whom I had suspected was having an affair with Ulrik in Paris. When I saw the two of them exchange a quick and meaningful glance, it cut me to the quick. Unfortunately, the method I chose to vent my hurt and anger was a little odd: I took the big wad of gum I was chewing and parked it in the offending dancer’s hair. (I’m sure that showed him.) When the dancer demanded that I remove the gum, I grabbed the bartender’s lemon-slicing knife and—after making sure the gum was imbedded in as much hair as possible—hacked away to remove the mess. Ten minutes later, when this newly coiffed dancer and I passed each other on the way to the men’s room at the back of the bar, I rounded out my odd retaliation tactics by grabbing him and kissing him.

  Displays of this sort were juvenile and illogical on my part, a cuckoo jumble of reactive actions. But I didn’t know how else to express my pain and confusion. In fact, if my physical life in those early years was an odd shuttle between the discipline of dancing and the dissolution of night-crawls, my emotional life was an equally bizarre back-and-forth between expression and repression. Onstage I focused on pouring as much artistic feeling and emotion and passion as I could muster into every step I took, while offstage I worked just as hard to conceal my true feelings from everyone around me—including myself.

  Another aspect of life back then that amazes and even frightens me when I think about it was the total absence of limits or rules on social and sexual behavior in the early 1980s. There was very little public understanding or awareness of AIDS as yet, and life and love and plain old sex were pursued with a happy and reckless abandon. Everybody was sleeping with everybody, it sometimes seemed to me. There were company members who would switch-hit, back and forth, in their sexual preferences (I remember there was a psychic who was popular with many of the dancers who seemed to be particularly adept at convincing gay people that they were straight, and vice versa), thereby compounding the possible permutations and combinations in life. I probably would have considered jumping into the joyous fray with more enthusiasm myself if I had had a little more free time, had been a little surer of my o
wn looks, and had not been such a hopeless romantic. Luckily for me, perhaps, I was what I was: extremely busy, very shy, somewhat insecure about my looks, just a little old-fashioned about love—and very definitely 100 percent gay. Focusing on my dancing and trying to keep track of my wandering boyfriend kept me pretty busy, and as a result I got into less trouble than I might have otherwise.

  In an interview my mother once commented about this period of my life, and what she considered the miracle of my survival as a young teenager on my own in New York: “It wasn’t until later that we thought about what we had done—leaving such a young boy alone in the city—and we were horrified. We really regretted it. I don’t know how he made it through, how he managed not to tumble into some kind of terrible trouble.” It’s true that I did not have the traditional structure of family or an educational institution to guide me, but in my professional life I was surrounded by amazing role models. Everyone involved with the company—the brilliant teachers and choreographers and dancers, the stage managers and crew, the talented set and costume designers, the artisans in the NYCB costume shop, and, of course, the members of the wonderful NYCB Orchestra—was driven by and devoted to their art. And I was right there with them: driven and devoted, delighted and honored to be working with like-minded people who had so much to teach me.