“Taken over?” My Lai.
“No, no, you got me all wrong. Let’s get off Abdul, we have too much to do together to be getting all convoluted. You’re right, he’s cool, and I
am
tripping, and I guess a little scared it’s all going to—”
“
All
what, huh? All your daddy’s and My Lai’s mommy’s financed company might really become a fucking real company you don’t control.” Snake.
“OK, OK, point taken. Now can we kill this and get back to what we were talking about before?”
Discipline, I tell myself, and
breathe.
Disappear into your breath, defuse your anger. Don’t move except to lean further over and read from John Percival.
She taught, not professional students but children. Nureyev was made to dance for her: a gopak, a lezginka and other folk dances. As he danced, the old lady looked stunned, and at the end she gave him the advice he had already heard from others: “Go to Leningrad, study there.” But from her lips it meant something at last, and the boy blushed. Besides, she was much more peremptory: “Child, you have a duty to yourself to learn classical dancing.”
When they get up, I feel wiped out, like that guy on that TV special on renal dialysis, as if something had just removed all the blood out of my body. I sit there waiting for whatever it is that’s gone to come back. I mean, I knew he didn’t like me. But why? Because I’m good, because I’m black? His “concept”! What is it with them, if they’re sucking our shit, hip-hop or R&B or something, it’s all good, they love love
love
us, can’t get enough of that funky stuff, eat it up, cash in. Yet me being with Herd all of a sudden—well, it wasn’t no all of a sudden. He’s been scared from day one I’m going to “take over.” Where’s his fucking stupid head? Spozed to be so intelligent. Well, maybe he’s right; before it’s all done, I will take over. But not from his stupid ass. His “concept,” fuck his concept! I feel tired now, rattled. None of my gigs pays me near enough to afford rent anywhere around here. I feel like I’m hurtling through dark space, like here we fucking go. I thought I was on solid ground, but it’s just smoke, mirrors, and quicksand all over again. Well, suck it in, put on a hard face, don’t let on you know shit. And shit, what do you know, really? Just get on out there and do the show, dance hard, harder than you ever danced. And when it’s over, you figure out your next move.
I close the book, look at his muscular body in white tights and chest bared. He’s on his knees, his arms muscular and sinewy raised above his head elegantly in fifth position. He has the face of a wolf, beautiful high cheekbones, smoky eyes, hungry lips. I look at him and know I have to be great while at the same time feeling I can’t really be. The confusion makes me want to kill something, fuck up everybody, including myself.
I’VE HEARD THE MUSIC
a thousand times, but because the wood floor trembles when I step like the walls around it are being consumed by flames and it will collapse at any minute, I mince my movement. I’m disgusted with myself; this is the third time I’ve missed the count where I’m supposed to come in; then after I miss the damn count, I can’t catch up and get on the beat, everybody has to stop. I think it’s me trembling, not the floor.
“You know this piece backwards.” My Lai.
“I’ve never seen you like this before. Pre-performance jitters?” Snake.
“Can we try it again?” Me. I haven’t experienced this kind of disconnect between my body and my command of it since I started dancing in Imena’s class in Harlem. I look at Amy, My Lai, Snake—I thought they were my friends. They’re no more my friends than Brother John, and then I think that’s not fair, not fair at all—
“Where’s your head, Abdul? You are so not here today.” Scott.
They’re not my friends or they are my friends so what! I’m a dancer; I don’t need to like these motherfuckers to do my job. You think Nureyev liked everyone he danced with? Hell no, he hated some of them.
“Everybody has an off day—” My Lai.
“I’m not having an off day. Can we start over and do it again instead of yakking about it? I missed my cue, goddamn it, so what!”
“Bet!” Snake.
ME AND MY LAI
are eating breakfast at a diner on Seventh Avenue off Sixteenth Street. My Lai is chowing down on a bowl of high-fiber cereal swamped with two orders of blueberries and nonfat milk. She’s spooning the cereal into her mouth, trying to get as many blueberries on the spoon as she can. The perfect smell of bacon sizzling on the diner’s grill brings tears to my eyes. I’m remembering Aunt Rita picking up a slice of bacon with her red-tipped fingers and holding it to my mouth. The greasy, salty pleasure of pork filled my mouth as I stared at the dark place between her breasts accented by her low-cut dress and hard black push-up bra. The bra I had thought was extra breasts when I saw it laid out on the white bedspread and buried my nose in the cups, drinking in her musky perfume smell. I get up and head to the restroom in the back of the diner, the tears almost spilling over. I head past the urinals for the one stall. Locked inside, I sob, seeing her leaning out a hotel room door as I trot down the hall to the bathroom, the floor always sticky-slick with piss, sometimes blood and needles, occasionally shit, no matter how she complained or cleaned. I couldn’t imagine why she felt she had to stand watch; I was a big boy, nine years old, what could happen to me?
The urgent sound of piss surging in the trough outside the stall, a rap on the stall door, and a “Hey, buddy, I need to take a dump” remind me I’m in the wrong place to get gushy. I open the door, and there’s a guy about four feet five and three hundred pounds at least whose face looks like one big pimple. Has he been listening to me cry, waiting for me to come out, because he can’t, I mean, no way can he fit in this stall to take a shit or anything else. He’s actually blocking my exit.
“Mind if I pass, buddy?” I say. He’s fluttering a fifty-dollar bill between his thumb and forefinger.
“Oh, no, of course not,” he says, still not moving and like a magician producing two more fifty-dollar bills out of nowhere. He looks up, I catch his eye, burn him. He flings his weight to the side and lets me pass.
When I get back to the booth, my pancakes are cold. I wave my hand for the waitress. “Could you heat this up for me?”
“Sure.” She swoops down on the plate and picks it up as gracefully as she put it down. She does her job well, I think, watching her wide hips walk away from the booth, wondering what it would be like to ride them. And why am I thinking about the waitress when I got life sitting in front of me? Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep last night, or maybe that’s just how guys are, we can’t help it. What Scott said runs through my head:
Like, who is this guy?
Fuck that dry-ass faggot. If it wasn’t for My Lai, I’d destroy his fucking ass loft before I split, but it’s not just her; I’m holding myself back because of me. I don’t want that kind of karma riding my ass, plus Daddy’s boy might call the pigs. I got enough dogs on my brain as it is.
“What are you thinking so hard?” she asks as I pick up a piece of bacon and put it down after one bite.
“I was thinking you’re right, the best thing about bacon is how it smells. It smells way better than it tastes—at least this stuff here does.” I push it to the side of the plate and spear a forkful of buttery blueberry pancakes, which taste pretty good despite being nuked back to life.
“That is
not
what you were thinking.” She pouts.
“Calling me a liar?”
“No, just saying you weren’t thinking about no fucking bacon. You know, every time, half the time you feel something—”
“Which is it? You’re contradicting yourself, every time, half the time—”
“Would you let me finish? When you feel something, you hide it from me.”
She’s pouting again, or at least that’s how it seems to me. And what can I say? It’s true. Instead of getting closer, I feel myself building a wall, or maybe I’m digging a hole.
I remember Roman’s meddling ass and look at My Lai and think it’s better not to know. I swear that ninny went through everything I had or brought into that apartment.
“You know, something is funny with you papers.”
“Why were you even bothering with them?”
“Because you live here, you mine,” he said, matter-of-fact. “I help you. So I want to know you.”
It didn’t register then, but I think now, if he had gone through that envelope, he had to know how old I was, fucking faggot. I hadn’t even gone through the envelope myself except to glance in it when I left St Ailanthus. There was nothing in it could help me with the shit I was going through. It was just I didn’t have shit, and whatever I had, I held on to. I remember Aunt Rita giving it to the white woman who took me away from the hotel, then Miss Lillie, then the Brothers at St Ailanthus, then they gave it to me, and I brought it from Roman’s to the loft.
I don’t give much thought to Roman’s “something is funny with you papers.” I figure it’s a mistake like so much of my life. So I call 311:
“Hi, I need to get a copy of my birth certificate.”
“Foster care?” She must could tell I’m young.
“Yeah.”
“Aging out?” she asks.
“Yeah.” In a way I wasn’t lying—it
should
have been true; legally, I was still over there on 805 St Nicholas Avenue with my grandmother (only she wasn’t my grandmother when I checked out my mother’s shit!). “I know I was born in Harlem. How do I get a copy of my birth certificate for school and a New York State ID?”
“You can get it by fax, Internet, mail, or you can walk in and get it the same day.”
“OK, bet, walk in?”
“To get it in person, you come to 125 Worth Street between Centre and Lafayette, Room 133, between nine a.m. and three-thirty p.m. Enter using the side entrance on Lafayette Street. It’s fifteen dollars, credit card, debit card, check, or cash. We need your full name, your mother’s name, father’s name if available, and the reason for requesting the birth certificate.”
“Reason?”
“You already gave your reason: aging out of foster care with no documents; just repeat that when you get down here. It’s common, you ain’t gonna have no problem. It’s fifteen dollars, credit card, debit card, check, or cash. If the form is complete and payment paid, you should walk out with the birth certificate.”
She was right.
I look at My Lai. “Ready to go?”
“I think I’m going to get a poached egg on toast, I didn’t have any protein,” My Lai says.
“Order me one too,” I tell her, not even half listening to her go on about the evils of protein deficiency. I’m thinking about the birth certificate. The
mistake
is on this one too: My father’s name is the same as my mother’s father’s name. What’s up with that? It’s another dog loose in my brain, a bad dog.
“To get in a college dance program I got to have what?”
“The whole shebang—Social Security number, you got to come up, dude; same thing if you want to get a driver’s license, got to come up. Did you get your birth certificate?”
“I did. In fact, I actually already had one.”
“So why the drama?”
“I . . . there was a mistake on the one I had.”
“Mistake? What mistake? Did you fix it?”
“No.”
“Well, what is it, are you you? I mean, ah, nineteen, AA, a man, I know you got your Y chromosomes,” she teases.
“I’ll tell you later.”
“No you won’t,” and she stabs her egg with her fork. “Tell me
now.
Tell me now or get someone you can tell. I’m tired of being locked out. What do we have lately aside from you getting your dick wet regularly?”
“I’m . . . I’m in love with you.”
“Then tell me.”
I feel the hole getting deeper; I know I should say something, have to. She’s serious. But something won’t let me respond. At the same time, I can’t stop the tears from rolling down my cheeks. I wish Aunt Rita was here, she would tell me. I hang my head.
“Don’t leave me,” I beg, sobbing.
“Abdul, I love you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I was just being a hard-ass because I thought you were. Don’t worry. I should have known it was . . . was—whatever it was, was
big.
Honey, don’t,
don’t,
” she says, wiping my face with her napkin.
“IT WAS A
good rehearsal, guys. I think, no, I
know
it’s going to go off great. It’s controlled where it needs to be and wild and free where it can be. We’re on and off in fifty minutes. I’m saying the names, and the two screens are behind me, then when these screens synchronize with the helicopter scenes, My Lai, you’re on. The Jenkins track doesn’t come on until you’re out there. Don’t wait for it, because they’re waiting for you. Your cue is visual—those two screens synchronize and then merge into one screen center stage, and when we see that helicopter scene, get out there! The lights don’t go down, there’s no intermission or part one or part two—we’ve got to provide those divisions with our presence—and when the Leroy Jenkins track starts, My Lai, I want you to do like in rehearsal,
stalk
that music, eat it!
“So when My Lai comes offstage, the stage goes dark for a second, and you have Abdul center screen, it’s superb, that—it’s still mind-boggling that footage we got that day. So he’s on one screen, and that’s fully three minutes, and then the screen splits again, and he’s on the two screens, and then, you know, I mean, you guys know all this, the images go on the ceiling, out into the audience, on the walls surrounding the audience, on the audience’s bodies, so for a minute they’re inundated with scenes from this dancing black soldier.
“The risks are real, this couldn’t be rehearsed. What Snake said is true: We can’t predict if this is going to have the same effect on a full house of strangers that it had on us doing it at rehears—”