I'll Never Change My Name

by Valentin Chmerkovskiy

  To his little brother, Maks was always the Man. His situation would change drastically over the course of the next few years, and he would come into his own in ways that neither of us could imagine. From being “the Man,” he would grow into a real man. But for those first few years in America, I remember what he meant to me. He was my touchstone, my constant, a way to assure myself that even though everything else was changing around me, my brother would always be there.

  Music

  Performing onstage as Potsie in the school play was a turning point for me, because it was the first time I allowed myself to speak out in public in my new home of America. I spoke not with words but through my movements and my energy, and managed to communicate on a very intimidating level. For the first time since Odessa I felt that I had the upper hand. I was connecting to people on my terms, and since my English wasn’t up to speed yet, I got the message out via movement, displaying my personality and charm that way.

  But I was forced to prove my talent over and over. My first ballroom teacher in America dismissed me immediately. He said something along the lines of “At best, you’re only all right, kid.” My unvoiced response? “I’ll show you.”

  And I did. Three years later, when I was eleven and partnered with Inna Brayer, we won the U.S. Open dance competition at the Junior 1 level. That victory got us invited on Sally, a popular talk show in the mid-1990s, hosted by Sally Jessy Raphael.

  All of a sudden I was the shit. I remember being super excited, obviously—just three years off the boat and already on American TV! If you knew me during that period you’d have caught me smack in the middle of an identity crisis, in my lil’ gangsta phase, acting out, with an ego as big as the twin towers. You want me on your show? Oh, excuse me, I’m going to have to check with my imaginary agent first.

  Sally’s style was ragingly sensationalistic, since she competed head-to-head with TV schlock-meister Jerry Springer, whose own show once featured a transvestite who wanted to be an amputee so badly she cut off both of her legs with a chain saw. Compelling television.

  Every once in a while Sally hosted an episode that did not involve warring spouses or doggie hypnosis, one that actually contributed something pleasant to society. “Age Is Just a Number” was one of those shows, and it represented my big television debut. As the host, Sally invited guests who were at the opposite ends of the age spectrum. Inna and I were the cute little couple doing ballroom, contrasted with a very sweet ninety-year-old from the Broadway show Forever Tango. There were a dozen people of different ages who were all being accused of doing extraordinary things—or being celebrated for them, it was hard to tell the difference.

  I had actually seen Forever Tango on Broadway. A few years earlier my dad had scraped up some money somehow, enough to take his family on a classic New York outing.

  “Hey, we’re going to Manhattan to have dinner at a restaurant, then afterward I got tickets for a show.” He could have been scheduling a flight to Mars for all the sense it made in the context of the Chmerkovskiy family finances.

  We went to Olive Garden. I thought the place was the flyest shit on the planet. The waiter plopped a plate of marinara down in front of me and I had never seen anything like it. Red sauce? Really?

  “Oh my God, ‘pasta,’ what is that?”

  “It’s like noodles, but better,” my dad said. I didn’t know what it was, but I dug in, and I quickly realized it was very different from mama’s macarone. After the restaurant my father took us to Forever Tango. Dinner and a show. It was as if we were checking off a box on the list of what to do to become real New Yorkers.

  A year later, Inna and I joined the Forever Tango ninety-year-old and the rest of the “Age Is Only a Number” guests on Sally. I entered into that holy of holies, that sacred inner sanctum, my very first green room—I didn’t know what a green room was, but I thought it might be a synonym for “paradise.” A table stood loaded with snacks and soft drinks.

  “This food is free and I will have some,” I told myself. My dad had always preached that there was no such thing as a free lunch, so the green room feast was kind of a guilty pleasure for me, really going against the grain of my upbringing.

  For the performance I wore a blousy shirt featuring a zebra-print collage, with a big open slit in front. I thought I looked like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, when really I more resembled Spanky on Our Gang. I didn’t have braces yet, and I shouldn’t have smiled as much as I did, because the audience probably would have liked knowing a little less about my dental architecture. But I just couldn’t resist. My smile was a check and I just kept on cashing it.

  The producer gave us our call, and Inna and I went out under the bright studio lights and performed a paso doble, which is a march-style dance loosely depicting a bullfight. The explosiveness of the dance lay in the intensity of the movement across the floor. But it turned out that the Sally stage was tiny, tiny, tiny. Because there was no place to move, our paso doble that day just looked like a bunch of stomping around, as if Inna and I were crushing grapes for wine.

  We did our best, making fierce faces to indicate our serious intent. We were just a couple of cute kids, and the audience loved us because kids can get away with anything, even when wearing the strangest outfits ever seen on Sally. I might have looked like a zebra making wine, but I was still getting applause.

  The after-dance interview was worse. Sally sat us down on director-style chairs that were way too high. During this period of my life I was working hard to convince myself that I wasn’t a child anymore, but being seated with my feet dangling in the air killed my confidence. I had stopped tucking in my shirt only half a year before—I was just that fresh. Any swagger I felt was very recently acquired, but now I was a television superstar.

  “So which category do you dance in?” Sally asked.

  I thought my answer was super intelligible, but in reality it made no fucking sense at all. My fractured English at age eleven should have made my appearance go viral, just like Shit My Dad Says. I was attempting to inform Sally that because the competition was so weak in my age bracket, I usually competed in an older age category.

  “What age do you dance?” she repeated.

  “We compete in Juniors,” I said with an air of confidence. “But sometimes we’re allowed to go higher.”

  Sally pulled a vaudeville-style double take. “You’re allowed to get high?”

  Ah, ha ha ha. The audience laughed and laughed at the gag.

  Sally Jessy Raphael put on shows that capitalized on the worst of human nature, and here she was just goofing on me, playing to the cheap seats.

  No amount of audience laughter could possibly faze this lil’ gangsta, though. I’ve often wondered where the fearlessness of a child goes when it leaves during adolescence. Where does all our courage disappear to, the strength to be who we are, unapologetically and automatically? Back then I had no real idea of who I was, so what did I have to fear? What insecurities could I possibly have, when I didn’t have anything to lose?

  I loved the whole experience of being on TV and thought my zebra shirt looked fucking awesome. Thank the Lord Sally was a daytime show, because my classmates were in school when it aired. There were no DVRs or YouTube back then for them to use to replay my humiliation. They missed it, that was it, and life went on.

  Nowadays the opportunity to review experiences on a cell phone takes people right out of the moment. We see it all the time, folks at concerts or live events, holding up in front of them their “black mirrors,” their little rectangular devices. Recording a moment gets in the way of being in the moment, and a replayed experience tends to be less sincere and more artificial than an actual one.

  Did my classmates feel my new superstar status when I returned to school after being on Sally? Maybe not, but I’m sure I had a little added pep to my step.

  I DON’T ACTUALLY REMEMBER MUCH ABOUT LEARNING ENGLISH. I was enrolled in ESL—English as a Second Language—classes but for the life of me
I can’t remember a single teacher or classroom session. The only English I had before I emigrated was gleaned from American TV shows. As I demonstrated during the famous Rollerblade incident, I knew to say “nine-one-one,” which sounded pretty cute in a Russian accent. I knew “hello,” and also the two syllables that linguists have determined to be the most widely understood word in the world: “okay.”

  The truth was, I learned how to speak English from trash talking on the basketball court, and from the rapid-fire rhymes of rappers I idolized. If you encounter profanity in these pages, blame the streets of Brooklyn, where it is used as simple emotional seasoning in casual conversation. When people ask me how long it’s been since I moved to the States, I can’t help but hear the implication: “It hasn’t been that long, has it?”

  I always have a knee-jerk response: “I’ve been here twenty-three years! This is a Brooklyn accent, not a Russian one! And I’m proud of it!” For me, the thought and context behind the words is the priority, not how they’re pronounced. Back then I didn’t care that I was sounding like a rapper. That’s how we spoke on the street. That’s how everyone I knew spoke.

  But it was an exciting time, because kids all around me, even native speakers, were learning new words and new ways to convey meaning. When you’re deprived of the ability to communicate effectively through words, it’s hard and demoralizing and a little like being imprisoned within yourself. Maybe that’s why I’m so in love with words today. I love choreographing words even more than I love choreographing dance steps. When I’m able to phrase a thought in just the right way, with just the right tone and rhythm and just the right context, it’s the most powerful feeling in the world.

  I wasn’t just learning a foreign language, I was also learning a foreign culture—humor, attitude, fashion, the whole package. We lived in the hood where everybody wore Air Jordans. I thought the local Payless shoe store was an absolute wonderland. That was my Saks Fifth Avenue. My parents were going to spend $40 on a pair of sneakers for me? I don’t know how many people can relate to standing at the register absolutely quivering with anticipation.

  “Oh my God, this is gonna be so cool!” At the same time, alongside a rush of gratitude, I would feel the most incredible load of guilt. Forty dollars, spent on me? I knew they didn’t have the money. When you’re broke, everything is expensive. Even then, at eight or nine years old, I was posing questions to myself. How can I start contributing? Those sneakers were great, but when would I start paying my dues to the family team?

  Fast-forwarding a little, my first purchase with my own money came at age twelve. I remember it well. I had finally started making some bank for myself, working as a dancer alongside my brother at Russian restaurants. The first week I saved $75, the next week after that about the same amount, and on and on every week until I had put together a grand total of $250.

  I headed off to the mall and for $200 I bought a pair of JNCO jeans. You cannot imagine how ridiculous teenage fashion was back then, but just Google JNCO and you’ll get a hilarious whiff (the style is actually making a comeback now). With the red stripe down the side and the brand-name character on the back pocket, JNCOs were obnoxiously wide and humongously long, resembling parachutes more than pants.

  Yeah, JNCO jeans were obnoxious and ugly and stupid, but all the cool kids wore them, and just for once in the course of my life in America, after all the tucked-in shirttails and dweeb outfits, I hungered to look like a cool kid.

  During my early years I was convinced deep down inside that I was the coolest kid in the world. But as a native Russian speaker in America, I was like Charlie Chaplin trapped in Helen Keller’s body. I couldn’t shine. I couldn’t entertain. I couldn’t speak English that well. It was like hell on earth.

  I wasn’t the only one who was an immigrant in my school, and I wasn’t the only one who had a weird-ass accent. There were Asian kids, Latinos, and countless other Eastern European immigrants. Simply as a matter of survival, I gravitated to my Russian peers. People naturally relate to somebody who sounds like them, and I also related to kids who understood what my mom was going to whup my ass for, because this Russian kid, he had his ass whupped for the exact same misdeeds as I did. Having things in common was how I built friendships that have lasted all my life.

  Among my other baggage, I hauled around a tongue-twister of a last name. I always feel sorry for non-Russian-speaking Americans whenever they encounter it. They might be making introductions at a party, or reading a slip of paper to announce me onstage, and I see the puzzlement and fear come into their eyes when they realize they will have to try to pronounce the impossible. Right at the start, the first syllable represents an almost insurmountable obstacle.

  “Chmer-”? Really?

  The non-Russian mouth simply balks at following a “sh” sound with an “m” sound. In New York City, you might ask a deli person for “a bagel with a schmear,” meaning a bagel with a smear of cream cheese. That Yiddish “sh”-followed-by-“m” phrase comes close.

  “Shmer-.” Spoken aloud, the first syllable of my name sounds like a Dr. Seuss character.

  After mangling the hopeless first syllable, the nonnative speaker gratefully rolls into the “-kov-” only to discover that a “v” is to be pronounced like a “w,” so it isn’t “-kov-” it’s “-kow-.” The last challenge comes with the “Whoa! What’s-that-‘i’-doing-in-there?” final syllable, “-skiy.” Is it “skee” or “sky?” What the hell? I give up!

  “Shmer-KOW-skee.”

  If you think that’s tough, try the Cyrillic alphabet version of Valentin Aleksandrovich Chmerkovskiy: Валентин Олексáндрович Чмерковський.

  Oh, screw it, I sometimes think. Maybe I should change my name. Val Smith. Val Jones. Life would be so much easier. But I’ve always had way too much stubborn pride to do it. My name is my self. My name signals to the world that it has to take me as I am. Even if people shatter their teeth trying to say it, my name is me.

  On the streets of South Brooklyn in the 1990s, I was a member of a little Russian immigrant crew that played a lot of basketball in the parks around the area. We’d do pickup games against black kids, Italians, and Puerto Ricans, and get respect because we were able to hold our own. Eventually we mixed up the teams, metaphorically displaying social assimilation right on the ball court. Slowly, by hearing kids talk trash to each other, I learned not only the language but the energy and culture of my new home. We were all different, and that was our similarity.

  Popular music took on a larger and larger role in my life. I started listening to a lot of hip-hop, and that kind of music absolutely overflows with strings of densely packed rhymes and outrageous verbal play. In hip-hop, the words were choreographed in the most beautiful way to complement the coolest sounds and most stirring beats that I had ever heard. The songs seemed to echo my guiding principle, “Keep it moving.”

  One of the reasons I came to love hip-hop as a genre was because the songs told stories. I didn’t have to read books because I listened to rap. Growing up I wasn’t a bookworm like my brother. It’s a lousy confession to make in a book, but I’d rather write, I’d rather create, and I’d rather express myself than read. Don’t get me wrong. I’m super grateful that you’re reading this book right now. But as a kid, I never cracked a book besides the texts that teachers assigned for school. Instead, I listened to Nas, to Biggie, to Tupac and the other elite poets of the street.

  But that soon changed when I opened my mind and started reading literature after meeting two of the most important people outside of my immediate family circle, who entered my young life almost immediately after I came to America.

  MY FAMILY WAS AS POOR AS THE DEAD, BUT MY PARENTS HAD simple basic requirements regarding their children. First off, we needed to find a dance academy for Maks, and naturally I would tag along with my brother to his lessons. But in the eyes of my parents violin was my calling, so I needed to have a music teacher as well.

  We discovered a gre
at one. Her name was Yulia, and she taught students in her little Bensonhurst apartment. As an added attraction her husband, Victor, worked as a tutor in Russian language and literature. While the members of the Chmerkovskiy family were Americans now, my parents didn’t want us to leave behind the glories of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Chekhov—the Russian author, not the character on Star Trek.

  P.S. 216 didn’t provide music lessons for students, and there was no school orchestra or band, but my parents were determined for me to continue my music education. I had been playing for three years at that point, and I guess they had endured all my strangled-cat early practice sessions and had suffered enough to finally earn the right to hear the Vivaldi.

  Yulia became an instant influence on my life. She was hard as nails, stricter than any coach I ever had. She adored me and believed in me. I owe her and my parents so much for my life in music. My experience with Yulia emphasized my separation from the crowd of kids at school. The Chmerkovskiy family had different after-school activities, ones that would give us tools that were just not available at P.S. 216. I thought all of our extracurricular activities made us either strange or special, depending on how I was feeling at the moment.

  My violin lessons cost $15 for an hour. Yulia would accept the money when we could afford to pay, and when we couldn’t—well, we always came up with the fee eventually, because there was nothing more embarrassing to a Chmerkovskiy than debt. We were like the Lannisters from The Game of Thrones in that respect, because we always paid our debts.

  Yulia would take the fee for an hour’s lesson and then proceed to teach me for two and a half or three hours. I went to her straight from school, already totally exhausted from the day. I had a constant thought running through my head: Screw these violin lessons, do I have to go through my whole life, man, with these frigging violin lessons?! I went two or three times a week. She would teach for a while, then take a break midlesson to make me sandwiches.