The Sex Squad

by David Leddick

  Illy said, “Let’s go to Staten Island on the ferry.”

  We arose as one, went to the subway, and took the train to South Ferry. We ran into the terminal to dash through the big doors on the upper level and straight on to the upper deck of the boat.

  That was the old green Victorian ferry terminal then. The new one wasn’t built yet. The old one was much more in keeping with boat travel. You could imagine the ladies with their long swishing skirts and umbrellas, holding their piled-up hair and towering hats as they hurried aboard. The men accompanying them in derbies, with high, hard collars and a New York Times rolled up tightly under their arms. This was their terminal, with that late-Victorian look and smell–narrow windows, buff plaster, linoleum floors, and mahogany woodwork. The peculiar smell that old plaster and old wood gives off. There was something sexy about it, too. It suggested rendezvous in second-rate hotel rooms, white thighs, thick pubic hair with a large, dark penis thrusting out of it, clothes half dropped off, dark and woolly, white and starchy. No slim, fit, suntanned bodies for these folks. Theirs was sex as need, desperate and groping, and soon over, to be forgotten and lied about.

  We stood on the front deck and froze our butts. You know how the Staten Island ferry is. The rounded ends, front and back, with the folding metal grilles to let people on and off. The open side decks with the benches. The big inner room with all the benches that look like they came from the old Pennsylvania Station or a church somewhere. Right in the middle, that snack stand with the coffee and the big greasy doughnuts. I loved those doughnuts. I never eat anything like that anymore, but then I could eat twenty of them and never see the difference.

  We stood on the deck looking up at the night sky. So navy blue and full of stars that night. It was very clear, and the lights of Manhattan didn’t dim the skies out here on the harbor waters. The few lights of St. George were tossed over the rising hill of Staten Island. There were very few other people on the boat. No one was coming home from work on Christmas Day, only a few people who had been visiting in Manhattan for the day.

  We were planning to just get off the boat and circle round the terminal and take it right back again. You weren’t allowed to just stay on and ride it back. They had a little man in a navy blue uniform and cap to shoo you off. I’m sure if you were determined, you could hide in the bathrooms–but the fare was only five cents. We could afford that.

  As we walked into the terminal, a voice was squawking over the intercom, “Last train to Tottenville. Last train to Tottenville.” Right there, before us, was a little train. A cartoon name and a cartoon train. We really didn’t even look at each other. We just ran and jumped on the train. The doors slammed. We were off to Tottenville. We knew it couldn’t be far away, because Staten Island wasn’t very big. Would we even have enough money for the tickets? We did. When the conductor came around, we dumped all our money together and bought round-trip tickets. We knew we had to come back. We had one dollar left. Enough for the ferry and the subway for four people on our return: five cents and a dime, respectively, for each of us.

  Our miniature train chugged through the snow of Staten Island, stopping at towns none of us had ever heard of. It could have been Vermont, or Ireland, twenty or thirty years earlier. There were very few lights out the train windows. It was one o’clock in the morning, very late on Staten Island.

  We were the only passengers to descend at Tottenville. The train station, Victorian to match the terminal, was as miniature as the train, but there was someone on duty behind the ticket grille. We asked when the next train returned to St. George and the ferry terminal and the agent said five-thirty. We asked if there was a coffee shop or a restaurant open. He seemed to sense that we were on some kind of moonlit escapade and told us that there was nothing to do in Tottenville but take a stroll and see the sights until the train left. Tottenville was a beach resort. We had crossed the island and were on the Atlantic shore.

  I just recently read a biography of Aaron Burr. That strange man who killed Alexander Hamilton, Burr would most probably have been the emperor of Mexico if he hadn’t been apprehended in New Orleans on his way there. His name was linked with his own daughter’s, which may have been why he challenged and shot Alexander Hamilton. That same daughter disappeared at sea when the boat that was bringing her back to her father in New York from her failed marriage in the Carolinas was captured by pirates. (I had always been fascinated by the idea of walking the plank. She was someone who actually had.) There was always talk about Aaron Burr’s effeminacy. He was a small and pretty man, who after all his trials married a former whore. Previously, she had married a wealthy wine merchant and was very rich when she and Burr wed. This was the apogee of her career, married to a famous, or infamous, man, but they soon split up. Not long after, just before he died, he insisted on being taken to a boardinghouse on Staten Island, near the Atlantic, perhaps here in Tottenville. In his final moments, at his request, his mattress was carried to the beach. He died there on the sand, as close as he could get to the waters that had closed over his daughter. Was that it? Was that why he wanted to die by the edge of the sea? There was something magical about Aaron Burr that has never been fully explored by the historians who want to tramp around over his story and force him into place beside Washington, Madison, Jefferson, and the rest of them. I’ve read Washington was very much in love with Lafayette, a slim, young French officer with pink cheeks when he arrived to help in the Revolutionary War. There are certainly many undercurrents to history that have been ignored. Washington married a widow and never had children. Am I on to something or not?

  We tramped all over the hard-packed snowy streets of little Tottenville. Wooden Victorian houses. Big, bare trees. Clear sea air and cold, not too cold. But we four ragamuffins in our dark clothes, hunched down, hands in pockets, braced ourselves and were brave as we trudged down the middle of the streets. Tottenville had single bulbs strung overhead at each intersection, throwing long black shadows as we crunched away from them, heading towards the next intersections. As we passed under them, the lights flickered and swung in the night wind. The streets were lined with empty trees, lacing their branches together against the blue-black sky. Through them we could see little diamond stars. In the Middle Ages, people thought the sky was a bowl and that at night, when the sun was down, you could see the little holes in the bowl letting the light of an even more brilliant world shine through. As a child in Michigan, I could easily imagine that at night. I could imagine it again in Tottenville.

  A timeless world lit only by the streetlights at the intersections. All white and bare, under the navy blue light of the night. We four black figures, travelers, seekers, pilgrims crossing the snow in the cold, cold night, but not complaining. None of us knew quite why we had impetuously run off to Tottenville, but we were artists–or so we believed. Looking for new experiences and exploring our emotions. This was before drugs.

  We slowly crisscrossed Tottenville in the night. There were no cars out on this cold Christmas night. Only one light shone from an upstairs window in all of the town. It must have been a bedroom window. High in a tall, square, befurbelowed Victorian house, dripping in porches and wooden gingerbread, like a damp cake with the single large candle of a wooden tower. Someone was in the house and that someone was up. Reading in the night, perhaps drunken in the night, maybe not able to go on one more minute with his or her meaningless, frozen life. I imagined it all in a moment. A leftover, once-monied Tottenville family. The last child who never left home (a man, a woman?), well-read and lonely in their upstairs room. Knowing that nothing was keeping them there but having no idea of where to go. Not for me, I thought. That will never be me.

  Illy was enjoying his adventure. The snow, the dark blue light, the swinging streetlights. Almost golden crystals themselves in the crystalline night. Alfred was probably imagining it all as a ballet set or a box by Joseph Cornell. Small images of dark nights, snowflakes, lacy trees. It was exactly the kind of night when the ballerina Taglioni
might have descended from her carriage into the snow to dance for bandits, in exchange for being allowed to keep her diamonds. Alfred would have loved the night for these things. Tottenville was a kind of ballet decor.

  Sapphire-eyed Fabian would have enjoyed it only because he was with dancers from the opera he didn’t knew well in a place he knew not at all. He was adventuresome. All dancers are adventuresome. Perhaps even more so then, when most people in the United States had never seen a ballet dancer, let alone a ballet.

  Finally, we returned and sat in the train station, keeping warm, for about an hour. Then the conductor walked along the slippery platform swinging his lantern, the lights went on in the train, and we were ready to return to New York.

  It was beginning to get light as we recrossed on the ferry. We had no money left for even a cup of coffee. What we had would be required for our subway fares. We were so honest. None of us would have dreamed of jumping the turnstile, even in desperation. We would have walked first.

  On the boat and during the snowy walk, Illy never touched me. It would have been quite out of character for him even to throw his arm over someone’s shoulder in camaraderie. I wasn’t surprised, and would have been surprised if he had made some kind of affectionate gesture. Which he never would have, particularly in front of Alfred and Fabian.

  On the staircase going down to the subway at South Ferry, we were behind Alfred and Fabian, and I said to him, “How about a sleepover?” He looked at me with those sly, almost Oriental, Genghis Khan eyes and said, “How about a fuck-over?” and reached over and pinched my ass. Quite out of character. Illy couldn’t easily be affectionate, but occasionally he could be pretty cute.

  Alfred got off at Fourteenth Street and we left Fabian on the train to go to the Upper West Side, where he shared an apartment with some other boys. We offered no explanation to him as to why we were getting off the train together. I’m sure he thought we were going to go sleep together somewhere, which wouldn’t be really discussible news in the dressing room. That we were lovers of a kind would be. But he wouldn’t draw conclusions without more evidence. I knew he would gossip. All ballet boys do. But we were limiting the damage and having a fuck-over. It was a good one.

  Harry Thinks About Antony Tudor

  There was something reptilian about Antony Tudor. Snake-like. He was one of those people you can’t care about. No matter what terrible thing you might hear had happened to them, you wouldn’t care. He was very unlikable. He probably wanted it that way. He didn’t like me.

  Our paths never crossed except in partnering class. He taught regular class once a day, but I never took his class. I only took Miss Craske’s. He had a kind of movement style that I really didn’t want to develop: a really erect spine with the legs under it, going this way and that. All on one plane. No leaping or turning. Something like someone balancing a broom on the tip of their finger. You know how that goes? The broom swaying slightly and the person under it lunging in all directions to keep it upright. That was sort of the way he put dance steps together.

  In partnering class, he taught the classics: White Swan, Black Swan, Nutcracker, sometimes something from his Lilac Garden. Only the last had some of that skidding backwards and forwards.

  I took one regular class from him and I didn’t like it. He had an annoying trick of placing his hand between a boy’s legs and demanding that they hold it there with the strength of the inner thigh muscles. Of course, the boys who were sucking up to him, trying to get into the company or thinking he could get better parts for them, smirked and flirted. I just stared him in the eye when he tried it with me and clamped down real hard so he had a hell of a time getting his little pink hand out. He even seemed a little embarrassed, which was unheard of in his case.

  He was bald with fringe in the back, rather like Mr. Bing, the director of the opera. They both had a kind of bald-eagle shape to their heads, their noses a bit beaklike. Mr. Bing had a kinder and more open look in his eyes, which were dark. Antony Tudor’s were blue and hooded, like a snake, with the same dead, cobra gaze. He always seemed slightly drugged. Maybe he was.

  Whenever I took his partnering class, he always affected that he couldn’t remember my name, although he knew everyone else’s. One day my partner Irene and I were doing that lifting part where the White Swan pas de deux starts and he wanted to correct something. “You,” he said, “Umm, umm, umm …”

  “Harry,” I said, spelling it out across the chest of my T-shirt with my finger: “H-A-R-R-Y. Not such a hard name to remember.”

  He blushed and said, “I’m sorry.” But he never called me by name after that, either.

  It wasn’t a problem, really. We rarely saw each other, and I’m sure I never occupied his thoughts. One night, as I was coming into the theater, he was at the stage door, beautifully dressed, to accompany someone to the performance, I guess. He was wearing a navy blue suit and the vest was double-breasted with little curving lapels. Very English. Very smart, actually. It made me like him a little better.

  One of the older dancers in the company, who had been with Ballet Theatre, told me they had been in a rehearsal of Undertow with Tudor’s former lover Hugh Laing in the lead role. At that time, Hugh Laing had been Tudor’s lover for umpteen years. Evidently Tudor was lashing out with his viper’s tongue, telling some dancer how hopeless he was when Hugh Laing broke in and said, “Oh, fuck you. You’re all washed up. You haven’t choreographed anything in years.” In a voice that could be heard all over the theater.

  Tudor said nothing, just hung his head and walked into the wings. The rehearsal was over. As I said, you might have felt sorry for someone else, but never for him. There was something so lethal, so mean, about him, you would have felt you were really overdoing it by feeling any sympathy for him.

  There was something of a cobra about him. You always felt he was coiled to strike and you’d do best to stay out of reach. Except for those gullible guys who thought a few minutes in the sack with Mr. Tudor might pay off career-wise.

  I found out Illy had slept with him when we were lying in bed one night having just done the Big Nasty. He was lying there stretching those beautiful thighs and calves and feet. Illy had great feet, much better than mine. It made me think of the White Swan pas de deux, which we’d been practicing that day, and I said, “I hate Antony Tudor.”

  Illy said, “Oh, he’s okay. I slept with him to make sure I got into the company. He was on the audition board and asked me to go to dinner afterwards. Was I going to say no?”

  I didn’t scream or throw up. But I was indignant. “How could you?” I said. “He’s so old and so horrible.”

  “He wasn’t so bad. He’s in pretty good shape. A whole lot better than Vernon Fly.” Mr. Fly was my neighbor on the top floor of my building on Sixteenth Street. We often compared his physique to the Pillsbury Doughboy. The fact he always wore white didn’t do anything to help the situation.

  I didn’t want to say, “God, you’d sleep with anything.” After all, he was sleeping with me. But I couldn’t imagine it. “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I fucked him. He wanted me to fuck him. He didn’t want to fuck me, and I wouldn’t have done that anyway. What was funny is that they called me the next day. Mattlyn Gavers, you know, the ballet mistress.”

  “I know Mattlyn Gavers, I see her every day, for God’s sake.” Sensible Miss Gavers was the only one in the entire Met ballet operation who seemed to be totally sane.

  “Anyway, she called and said they’d decided they wanted me right after I auditioned. It was a done deal before I ever left the theater. They just waited until the next day to call. So I didn’t really have to sleep with Tudor after all.” He laughed and reached for a cigarette.

  “Of course Tudor knew that when he asked you to dinner. He figured now or never,” I said.

  Illy looked at me admiringly. “You’re right. Any other night I would have turned him down. You’re quick, Harry, you’re quick.” He looked at me as though he was noticing som
ething about me for the first time.

  But later, after I left the opera, finished medical school, and had come back to New York, I went to see Ballet Theatre’s production of Lilac Garden, probably Tudor’s best ballet. (Who could have been dancing in it? Scott Douglas, I remember. Perhaps Nora Kaye was still dancing then. Maybe Eleanor D’Antuono. She was a beautiful dancer and a beautiful woman.) I was very moved. All that stiff-backed movement made so much sense. The young man whom the older woman really loves. The older man whom the older woman is about marry, whom she really doesn’t love. The whole network of everyone loving the wrong person and keeping quiet about it. Just moving formally through the garden and their lives, not resisting where society was sweeping them.

  And I forgave Antony Tudor everything. He must have been like someone who had survived a great war where they had been forced to do horrible things. His emotions were dead. I have no idea what the battle was that killed him off internally. Maybe it happened when he was very young. I know he came from humble beginnings. Was his father a fishmonger? Something like that.

  I didn’t feel sorry for him; we all are responsible for what happens to our emotions. But I admired him for having at least extricated something wonderful and made it come alive in a ballet, even if he couldn’t make it come alive in his own life. I forgave him for being the sinister despoiler of the not-so-innocent. He had put something on the ballet stage that Petipa and Massine and Balanchine never could have.

  Balanchine was never interested in anything except the way bodies move, never emotion. Martha Graham was interested in emotion but couldn’t make bodies move using ballet movements. Tudor managed it. Shithead that he was, he made something new and beautiful and rich for us. Then he lost it, and lived on a long, long time in the shipwreck of his life.