by Jock Soto
The day for our August adventure finally came and Luis and I headed out to New Mexico, where Pop picked us up at the Albuquerque airport and drove us over the mountains in his RV to Eagle Nest. Pop had positioned a framed photograph of Mom against the windshield of the RV in a way that projected a magnified reflection of her face back at any passengers, and she was smiling out at me as we bumped our way through the twisting mountain roads. It was a little eerie. I sat in the big swiveling easy chair next to the driver’s seat, where Mom always used to sit, and at one point Pop turned to me and told me it made him feel powerful to have me sitting there. Also eerie. Just as we were approaching Eagle Nest he announced that he had a special surprise for us—he had invited a few people from the community to meet me and have dinner with us the following night.
“That’s nice,” I said. “How many?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Pop answered. “I put an announcement in the local paper: ‘Meet and Greet at a Dinner with Jock Soto, New York City Ballet Dancer and New Resident of Eagle Nest.’ Somewhere between fifty and a hundred? We’ll see.”
Luis and I looked at each other in disbelief. We hoped he was joking—but he was not.
The next day Luis and I got up early and shopped at the tiny Valley grocery and cooked like demons all day—grilled sausage with cannellini beans, penne Bolognese, tomato-and-mozzarella salad. Everything was ready just in time as the first guests began arriving promptly at five. About sixty people showed up in the end—everyone was very nice, and my father was especially proud that the mayor of Eagle Nest, a woman, attended. After dinner, as it began to get dark, someone hung a bedsheet over the fireplace and set up chairs and showed Water Flowing Together. I hadn’t realized this would be part of the evening, and Luis and I chose instead to sit outside and admire the silence of the mountains and the amazing star-studded western sky I remembered so well from my youth. Our half-built house looked huge silhouetted against the night sky and the glistening lake beyond, and it already looked friendly and familiar too, as if it were waiting patiently for us to come back to it. Was it possible that after all these years in New York I might be able to make a home out west? The concept seemed wild.
A few days later the official “family reunion” weekend launched and various guests began funneling into the tiny mountain town—Kiko and his wife, Deb; Deb’s aunt Carol and cousin Rick; Pop’s friends Stu and Donna; my Navajo filmmaker friend Nanobah Becker; my nephew Trevor; Kiko’s friends Kent and Lisa; my aunt Shelley and uncle Kevin and their son Andrew; my cousin Dawn and her partner, Jeannie; my former SAB classmate Jefferson Baum, who works nearby at the school of the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, and his girlfriend, Carla.
Mom’s youngest sister, Shelley, was the only sibling who made it to Eagle Nest for the reunion, in the end. (Shelley is the baby of the family—twenty years younger than Mom—and the only one of Mom’s siblings who also broke with tradition and married someone outside the tribe, my big, white-skinned, redheaded uncle Kevin.) We were a motley but happy crew, bound by either blood or friendship or both, as we gathered in the midst of a torrential downpour at the Lucky Shoe Saloon for our “reunion” celebration luncheon. It was not a particularly formal affair—we were surrounded by more television screens than I could count broadcasting every imaginable sports event, and conversations had to be fit between several highly competitive pool games (Kiko and Deb are both league players). Most of my mother’s siblings were conspicuously absent, but for a few brief hours on a rainy afternoon, a respectable chunk of my extended “family” gathered to spend time together and celebrate one another. We ate, we drank, we toasted Kiko’s and Kevin’s birthdays. We toasted our beloved Mama Jo. We hugged, we laughed, we reminisced. We plotted, vaguely, for more gatherings in the future. And then, as the sun finally drove away the storm clouds and reminded us that there was still a bright day waiting out there, Luis and I paid the bill and we all left. I had survived my first stint hosting a “family reunion.”
When I got back to New York I was exhausted, and I was overcome by the same feelings that I used to get on the few occasions when I visited my family out west during my years with the NYCB: shock (tinged with guilt) at the differences between the worlds my biological family and I inhabited, and sadness at how little we knew about one another’s lives. My feelings during the very rare occasions when my parents actually made it to New York to visit me were always just as confusing. I remember Mom and Pop coming to visit Ulrik and me once when we were living in an apartment on Twentieth Street. We had to move a television into the living room for my father, who even then had a hard-core addiction to the small screen. Pop sat there, glued to the TV all day, and at one point, without diverting his gaze from whatever he was watching, I remember he said, “Get me a drink, would you, Eric?”
“His name is Ulrik, and you’ll get your own damn drink” was my rude response. Not attractive, but I was wrestling with all kinds of anger and suppressed emotions at the time, in large part because of my father’s continued open and intense disapproval of homosexuals. Here they were, staying with me and my live-in boyfriend, and I still had not officially addressed the issue of my homosexuality with my parents. As it turned out, I would not find the courage to approach the topic until I was thirty, at which point my mother howled with laughter at my delusion that I could be “breaking any news.” But for years and years, my father’s implied dissatisfaction with me and my own failure to be honest made visits with my parents incredibly unpleasant and tense. I think some part of me also must have been afraid that if I wasn’t careful, the life I had worked so hard to leave behind would come crawling out of my parents’ bodies as they sat there in my living room, passively watching TV, sneak up, and steal me back again.
With my promotion to principal dancer in 1985, the world I was living in became even more dramatically different from the world I had been born in. I began dancing more and more lead parts with Heather, but also with a dizzying array of other amazingly talented ballerinas—Maria Calegari, Judith Fugate, Patricia McBride, Darci Kistler, Stephanie Saland, Lourdes Lopez, Diana White, Kyra Nichols, and many others. In my late-night postperformance escapades I was spending all my offstage time with a glamorous new surrogate family that included Heather and Peter, Peter’s son, Nilas, (also a NYCB dancer), Ulrik, and a few other dancers—most notably John Bass, Peter Boal, and Bruce Padgett—who were our closest friends. I remember hearing a rumor that some of the other dancers in the company referred to this inner circle as the “Royal Family” and feeling a twinge of discomfort. Somewhere inside me I sensed that there was something innately inappropriate about my being a member of an exclusive clique. But the situation was extremely seductive, and I pushed any misgivings away.
At night I moved with my new family from center stage at Lincoln Center to center stage at the Manhattan clubs that were all the rage in the mideighties—Nell’s on Fourteenth Street, the Pyramid Club on Avenue A, the Boy Bar, Palladium, the World, Wah Wah Hut, and, of course, the Odeon and Indochine, both run by Keith McNally, and the Canal Bar, run by Keith’s brother, Brian McNally. I remember at one point we were all given little keys that read NELL’S to attach to our key chains, which allowed us to cut all the lines and get into the clubs for free. We felt like hotshots—we were becoming somebodies.
Everyone in our little group—especially Heather, it seemed to me—was suddenly gathering more and more attention from the world at large. One night the screen actress Jodie Foster was sitting at a nearby table at the Canal Bar, and she stared and stared and stared at Heather. Another night at Il Cantinore in the Village we met the writer Tama Janowitz and the exotic Paige Powell, close friend and assistant to the famous pop art icon Andy Warhol, both of whom later introduced us to Warhol himself. I’ll never forget the first time I was invited to join Andy for dinner at the Algonquin Hotel. When I asked if I could bring some friends, he said, “Yeah, great. That’s great.” I took ten friends in the end, unabashed little upstart that I was, including Heather, wit
h whom Andy instantly became obsessed. He then began attending every ballet, always sitting in the same spot up front (Balanchine’s former seats, in the first ring, which we had provided), his white head luminescent in the dark theater as he stared intently at the stage throughout the performances. After the performances we would head downtown to meet Warhol and various members of his eclectic entourage—painter Francesco Clemente and his wife, Alba; the jeweler John Reinhold; singer Debbie Harry; artists Alex Katz, Stephen Sprouse, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat—wherever they had gathered. Often it was at a huge group table at Indochine, and when we arrived, Andy—who could be the most peculiar mix of quiet, fascinating, nasty, and flirtatious all at once—would murmur, “So great you came. You guys were great tonight.” We would drink and eat and dance and carry on all night—I never knew who paid.
One day Andy called and said he wanted to take photographs and paint portraits of Heather, Ulrik, and me as Christmas presents for us, so we headed over to The Factory for our photo session. Afterward we went to Mr. Chow’s, another regular haunt where Andy liked to hold court in a favorite corner. Keith and Jean-Michel would set up a boom box nearby and disappear in a cloud of marijuana smoke. Everyone I met seemed to be both talented and strange, and life itself was so fast and wild and exciting—surely we were all hot on the trail of at least fifteen minutes of fame.
On several occasions in those years Peter, Heather, Ulrik, and I were invited to dinner at Lincoln Kirstein’s house, as ballet objets to spice up parties when Kirstein was entertaining potential donors to the NYCB. Among the regular guests was a wealthy woman named Frances Schreuder, who had been hugely generous to the ballet community, but who ran into a sticky patch when it was alleged that she had urged her son to kill her father (her son’s grandfather) so that she could inherit his money. All of this seemed scandalous in an entertaining, wacky art-world way; and then there was the titillating mystery of Lincoln Kirstein’s wife—a woman named Fidelma who seemed never to be a part of our gatherings. After the dinners we would turn to one another as we hit the streets to head off to whatever after-parties there were on that night and ask, “Where in the world was Fidelma?”
On the surface, our lives may have seemed to be hip and glittering and glamorous, but during these same years a tinge of darkness—of recklessness and mishap and even of death—was also seeping in at the edges, staining the studied beauty of our ballet endeavors and the roaring gaiety of our nightlife. Balanchine’s illness, followed by his death in 1983, had been the first dark shadow cast over our beautiful playground. As the seasons unfolded, the tragedies multiplied. In September 1985, just months after I had been promoted to principal, the whole company was badly shaken when our beloved John Bass—a talented corps dancer and a man of high spirits and incredible wit—got mysteriously ill. John had come to a dinner at the Gruens’ one night with his right eye stuck shut—he didn’t know why this was happening, but he said he was going to the doctor the next day. The next thing we knew John had been diagnosed with a rare cancer, and quarantined in the hospital—and then he died. It was awful. No one understood exactly what had happened, but the doctors and newspapers all said that he had died of lymphatic cancer. We would learn soon enough that he had died of something else, a dreadful new disease everyone was calling “the gay disease”: it was AIDS, and John was only twenty-nine when he died. All of us who knew John were deeply saddened and confused by his death, and as the deadly statistics about AIDS began to unfold, and rumors began to spread about the many ways it could be contracted, the situation became terrifying. A killer had been unleashed in our midst—a silent, unpredictable killer.
Not five months after John’s death, in February 1986, another tragedy rocked the company. Joseph Duell, a beautiful dancer and promising young choreographer with the company, leaped from his fifth-floor apartment and died. Joseph had been promoted to principal less than two years earlier, and he was emerging as a major talent. Just the day before his death I had watched him give a disturbing, strangely distant performance of the first movement of Symphony in C. Everyone knew that Joseph was deeply committed to his art, but that he had struggled in the past with depression and other demons. But his death was unthinkable. Like John, Joseph was only twenty-nine. How could someone so young and strong and full of light be conquered by darkness? As one of our fellow dancers, Toni Bentley, wrote at the time in a piece about Joseph for the New York Times: “The source of a dancer’s power is the energy that distinguishes life from death. For suicide to enter such a world as ours totally dislocates us, our values and our visions.”
The unforgiving nature of a performance schedule can be a godsend in times of extreme stress and sorrow—whatever else happens, life and art must continue to play out from moment to moment for a dancer onstage. The company had danced the day Balanchine died and we had danced the day John Bass died and we danced the day Joseph Duell died. On all of these occasions we danced for and in honor of our absent brethren, carrying our confusion and sadness with us through our airy leaps and turns, letting whatever feelings were trapped inside us give color to our expression in that moment—this was the only way we knew how to process life. This was what I had been trained to do for years. You don’t talk about it, you don’t analyze it, you don’t dissect it—you go to class or you go to rehearsal or you go to the theater and you just dance.
When my twenty-first birthday rolled around that April, Ulrik threw a huge party for me at Brian McNally’s trendy Canal Bar. It was a strange and surreal experience for me to be the “guest of honor” at a gathering that was packed with famous New York artists and dancers and “celebrities” of all types. In addition to the ballet crowd and Andy Warhol and his superhip entourage, a smattering of high-profile people like Ray Charles, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Fran Lebowitz all came to celebrate with me. Ulrik documented the event with a photo album that had captions under the pictures, and I will never forget the shot of me standing on a table, screaming something at the top of my lungs. Beneath it he posted the caption: “At age 21 Jock finally DOES have a voice!”
It was true. Maybe my promotion to principal dancer and my arrival at the milestone of legal adulthood had given me more confidence and a clearer sense of who I was. But for whatever reason, for the first time I was beginning to think—and sometimes even to speak—for myself. Although I’m sure dancing so many new roles onstage had boosted my confidence in general, in retrospect it seems obvious that an important factor behind my growing sense of self, in addition to the passage of time, was my increasingly intense relationship with Heather, on- and offstage. As Heather and I became more established as partners onstage, and more attuned to the specific nuances of each other’s style, I could allow myself to explore and experiment more. It was always an exciting and often a quite daring experience to perform with Heather, because she could be counted on to challenge me while we were out there. She might take off for a turn when I was still ten feet away, or add extra pirouettes as if to say, “Ha, take that!” I learned to counter with challenges of my own. In the Nutcracker, in the grand pas de deux in the second act, I remember trying to do every turn or arabesque with one hand instead of two. It was exhilarating to dance such beautiful and complicated ballets with this sleek, spiky, edgy ballerina whom Balanchine had called his “wild orchid.” For all the boldness and complexity of her movements, Heather never made a sound with her pointe shoes, and audiences were transformed by the purity with which her dancing married the music. I could understand why someone like Andy Warhol had become fascinated with her; many people were. Heather’s bright blue eyes alone, with their long, lush eyelashes, were mesmerizing. When Andy did our portraits, he did several of Heather’s eyes alone.
Those intense eyes of Heather’s, and the way they could lock in on you—it comes back to me every time I recall the dark February day in 1987 when another sudden tragedy rocked our world. It was a cold and rainy afternoon—in the windowless New York State Theater you could never see or sme
ll the rain, but sometimes you could hear the rumblings of thunder exploding outside—and Heather and I were about to dance in a matinee performance of Peter Martins’s L’Histoire du Soldat. I was just about to make my entrance when a stage manager came up to me. “I hear your friend died today,” he said. I looked at him, confused. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “I have to go onstage.” “Your friend, the guy with the white wig,” he answered.
That was how I learned that Andy Warhol had died. It was so confusing, but I had to make my entrance. I didn’t have time to react, so I just walked onstage and began the pas de deux. I knew Heather could feel something was wrong. She kept sending me fierce looks with those piercing blue eyes of hers, seeking mine at every opportunity. We finished dancing, and the moment we were offstage I told her the news. I remember feeling shocked, and also scared and angry. When someone backstage reported that Andy had died in the hospital after a gallbladder operation, I refused to believe it at first. How was this possible? Something awful was happening in the world. I was twenty-one years old and my friends were dying.
Andy’s death that February was one of many profound moments that Heather and I would share, in life and on and off the stage, during the fifteen years we danced together. The combination of these intense experiences and the sheer volume of time we logged together seemed to bring us closer and closer with each passing month—in retrospect, it seems probable that I was relating to her more and more as a kind of surrogate mother. We went everywhere together and did everything together. I admired and trusted her, and asked for her advice about everything. In fact, there is no doubt in my mind that it was both Peter’s and Heather’s mentorship and support in those tender years of my late teens and early twenties that gave me the courage to try to formulate an identity of my own. I started looking around and thinking for myself, and after a while I began to consider new options in my private life as well as onstage.
