I'll Never Change My Name

by Valentin Chmerkovskiy

  “Maksush, you okay?” my dad asked, using the nickname, an adoring way of saying his son’s name. Russian is the greatest language in the world for nicknames. There are variations and variations on the variations. “Dima” for Dmitri, “Masha” for Maria, “Vova” for Vladimir, and “Sasha,” my own father’s nickname, for Alexander. I was often “Valya” and Maksim was often “Maksusha.”

  As tough and strict as my father was, he would always use such endearing nicknames when speaking with us—at least when he was washing dishes. I guess taking grease off plates was the secret to taming the Beast from the East.

  “Da vse normal’no,” my brother muttered. Yes, everything’s fine.

  “Look, if you’re unhappy assisting this shmuck,” my father said in Russian, “why don’t we open our own dance studio? Then you won’t have to assist anybody.”

  The proposal seemed to come out of thin air. Pops could have said, “Why don’t we fly off to outer space?” and it would not have surprised me more. He had never danced a step in his life. He not only had two left feet, he had two left hands, two left ears, two left everything. My brother, on the other hand—on the other foot—had danced his entire life, but was only seventeen years old at the time. This was the dynamic duo that would open their own business? It seemed unlikely to me.

  “All right, Papa, I’m in,” my brother responded simply, not fully grasping the magnitude of what he was agreeing to.

  “What about your computer job?” I called out from the other room.

  “I like being with people more,” my father responded. “I don’t want to be sitting in front of a screen all day, locked up in a cubicle like an animal.”

  And that was that. In a simple two-minute conversation, my dad and brother displayed the kind of pride that defined our family. Pursue what you love, and be willing to be miserable. My dad, who was getting well paid in his corporate job, said fuck it, I’ll starve again. Maks was too young even to think on that level, but he agreed instinctively to give up the best years of his life to pursue a dream. If you want to understand my pops or my brother, all you need to do is examine this scenario that played out at the kitchen table over borscht.

  The decision was made that would alter our lives and eventually send ripples out into the lives of many other people. Thank God my mother couldn’t hear the exchange over the sound of the vacuum she was using in the next room. I’m sure she would’ve chimed in and perhaps derailed the whole train of thought before it even left the station. She always was the reasonable one in the family, with her feet firmly planted on the ground. It was the fellas who lived in the clouds, imagining that their ludicrous ambitions might give them wings and actually let them soar.

  Back then, I didn’t really understand my father. I have more insight now. At that point in time he chose to return the family to financial instability rather than be stuck in a dead-end office position, seeing his dreams turn to dust as he wrote code in a cubicle the size of a jail cell. For my father an office job was a ticket to the gulag, maybe even worse than prison. He is and always was a man fueled by pride, not money. No compensation in the world was worth selling his soul.

  Sitting there listening, I thought of our family crashing back to the earth financially. I saw the sweet dream of a Nutella-spread sandwich as it was whisked away from me by my brother, a bitter teenager digesting his lunchtime borscht. I cursed my luck.

  That fuckin’ borscht, damn it!

  My brother wanted appreciation and my father wanted to be his own boss. I guess they both wished for a sense of fulfillment. Pops had been hustling all his life. Hustle was built into the hard-scrabble world of Odessa. A nondancer opening a dance studio was a slightly nutty, fairly risky proposition, but risk-taking was the essence of the hustle. He would only be doing what he had done all his life.

  Not in Brooklyn, though. We would not open a studio in Brooklyn because the whole borough was saturated with dance academies. Many of them were operated by friends and acquaintances in the tight-knit Russian immigrant community. My dad didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes—no pun intended. He didn’t want to create competition and animosity. In hindsight he was foolish to believe he could ever hide from those two inevitable companions. Competition and animosity would follow us everywhere we went, for years, until we built up an immunity to both.

  “Let’s go as far away as we can,” he said. “That way we’ll maintain good relationships with people at home.”

  “Where, Papa?” I asked. “Where do we go?”

  “New Jersey,” he said.

  Those two words sounded like a death sentence to me. If you are twelve, uprooting yourself is a major tragedy, especially when you have been trying hard to assimilate yourself into the Brooklyn school system. In the three years since I had shown up in Brooklyn, I had worked hard to make friends, first through basketball, before I had any English, and then through school. I felt as though I was just getting a toehold in our new home country.

  “New Jersey? Yer crazy!” responded one of my New York friends, when I told him we were moving.

  Don’t think that this was a discussion in the sense of the whole family weighing in on the options and voting. The Chmerkovskiy family was not a democracy. The sense of responsibility instilled in us by our parents’ sacrifice made us want to sacrifice, too. If my father said “New Jersey,” then fuck it, Jersey here we come.

  My parents, who had so little money, somehow managed to scrape up the funds to open a new business, offering a single product. Ballroom dancing was the draw, yes, but really what they were selling was Maks Chmerkovskiy as a teacher.

  Maks was great, Maks was handsome and impressive, all right, but I could barely imagine the pressure being put on him to deliver. He was seventeen years old and not even out of high school, but my father would be offering him up as a professional dance instructor—my father, who didn’t know a cha-cha from a choo-choo train. To him, Maks was like the champion thoroughbred in the stable, the one that was going to win races and bring home the prize money. For his part, Maks simply could not conceive of refusing.

  Saddle Brook, New Jersey, was a half-hour drive from the George Washington Bridge and Manhattan. Very few Russians lived there in 1998, and those who did preferred their kids to participate in good old all-American football, not ballroom dancing. That was an old-world activity, a blast from the past. It wasn’t something to push on your children if you wanted them to be modern and assimilated. We had no friends in the area and no support. So the Chmerkovskiy family was entering into uncharted territory.

  We found a location, and the first time I saw it, my heart sank. The building on North Midland Avenue lay between a cemetery, a set of busy New Jersey Transit railroad tracks, and a small makeshift farm. In the farm’s stable stood a forlorn thoroughbred named Rocky, an elderly former race horse living out his retirement years not in Kentucky bluegrass country but in gray, rainy Saddle Brook, New Jersey.

  Saddle Brook and the nearby towns of Garfield, Elmwood Park, and Paterson weren’t rich suburbs, but rather blue collar. This was strange and alien territory for me, not because they were blue collar but because they were suburbs. It was actually quiet at night, and that really freaked me out. I needed the ambulance sirens, I needed the subway, I needed my city.

  We planned an open house for our school, which we named Rising Stars Dance Academy. Maks and I beat the streets of local communities with our father, making the rounds to barbershops, nail salons, delis, and restaurants, handing out flyers.

  Rising Stars focused entirely on teaching kids, following the pattern of dance schools that my dad had seen in Brooklyn and back in Odessa. “Give me a child by the time he is seven and I will mold him for life” is a motto of the Catholic Jesuits, and that was our idea, too. In order to build up a healthy ballroom dance culture in the United States, we had to start them young.

  I watched my dad passing out our ads, interacting with the suburbanites of Ho-Ho-Kus, Saddle Brook, and Fair Lawn. “Hey,
guys,” he would announce in his broken English, “we opened a dance school, Rising Stars Academy. Take lessons, ballroom dance.” He finished off his little presentation with a charming smile. Maks and I inherited our charisma from our father, so we smiled, too.

  In return, we got a lot of looks like we were crazy. The shopkeepers we approached usually were polite enough, but it was clear to my preteen mind that nobody really understood what we were trying to do.

  Maks was front and center, put forward by my father as a brilliant young teacher of dance. I was the silent one, watching the whole process, on the inside, but seeing it from the outside. I was young, I was small, but I was conscious. I witnessed the burden being placed on the whole family, but especially on Maks. He was our workhorse. Everything depended on him.

  The dynamics between my father, mother, and brother appeared supercharged. I would think to myself, Fuck, look how stressed out they all are! My parents planned to open a new business only three years after arriving in a new country. They had no experience and had never even danced before. This was not just an entrepreneurial move, it was pure insanity.

  After two weeks of door-to-door promotion, the time for the open house at the studio rolled around. We threw our doors open at ten o’clock on a rainy Garden State Saturday morning. A superstition in Russian culture—one of the only nonpessimistic folk beliefs that actually works in favor of an enterprise—was that everything good and successful starts with rain.

  Despite the mystical blessing of rain, no one exactly lined up outside our doors. At ten fifteen there was still no one there. Crickets. It was agony. Everyone in the family had the same thoughts swirling around in their heads. Bills are going to have to be paid. Pops doesn’t have a job. We’re going down in flames!

  At ten thirty a mother brought in her seven-year-old girl, bright smile, half her baby teeth missing. Then another kid showed up. In all seven students presented themselves at the open house that day, and it was definitely a “be careful what you wish for” scenario, since now that we had potential customers we somehow had to take the next step and actually provide a service.

  “Shit,” Maks muttered to me. “I’ve got to figure this out.”

  He turned to me. “Val, front and center—okay, let’s go!”

  Suddenly I understood my place within the scheme of things. I would serve as the guinea pig, the example of what Rising Stars Dance Academy could do for a child. It was like a three-headed attack. My dad was making sure that the parents were signing up, taking care of the managerial element. Maks was out on the floor, mostly faking it but stepping up to the occasion. And I was the undercover one, the example they were led by.

  Meanwhile, Maks seemed to have only the loosest grasp on what he was doing. “More, more, more!” he yelled at me. More? More what? I squeezed out every ounce of my talent to be able to deliver Maks’s “more.” In hindsight he was doing his absolute best, using his limited experience of simply being an older brother to me.

  From that small, unsteady beginning a business was born, but more than that, a community developed. I saw it happen. The family element was the main attraction. We began spending all our time at the studio. Because we were the only game in town, the only Eastern European–style children’s dance program in Northern New Jersey, people slowly gravitated to us. I became a product of that school. The experience helped shape me into the dancer I’ve become today.

  Our students weren’t all Russian. The melting pot was still bubbling away in America, and we drew Italian kids, Cuban kids, all kinds of kids. I knew we had turned a corner when other dance studio owners started to bring their own children to our school to get an education. They understood that we were creating camaraderie and a communal spirit, that everything at Rising Stars was about being part of a family. All for one and one for all.

  Community was the key, community was everything. Some of the students may have lived in mansions, but they wanted to visit our apartment on the second floor of a two-family house. Because of the warmth that our family had, it was fun for others to hang out with us and be part of whatever was going on, to enjoy my mom’s cooking, listen to my dad’s gruff lectures, be a member of the dance crew that was slowly developing.

  When I turned fourteen I was thrown into the mix, too, promoted from student to instructor, teaching five-, six-, and seven-year-olds. I felt crazily out of my depth. How do you communicate with a five-year-old? How the hell did I know? Even though I wasn’t that far removed from being that age myself, the students appeared like little aliens to me, strange beings from another planet who just happened to stumble into our school.

  “Come on, man, you can do it!” That was the teaching style of my fourteen-year-old self. I could never quite master my brother’s drill-sergeant approach, so effective when instructing kids. I imagined myself more of a wise, mystic sensei straight out of the movie The Karate Kid. The problem was that I wasn’t wise, and any sense of mysticism I possessed came out of early illicit experiments with marijuana. Just like my brother, I always tried my best, even though my best as a teacher wasn’t always good enough.

  The school started to enter competitions. A fierce loyalty developed among the students, who called the place by its intials, RSDA. When we went to Nationals one year in Minnesota, we traveled in a raucous two-bus convoy, a twenty-hour ride that was somehow made not only bearable but enjoyable because of the sense of togetherness it fostered. The parents got involved and the whole experience turned from being a duty into an attraction.

  We’d do things that were a little out of the ordinary in the tradition-bound dance community. Our studio became notorious for having real cheering sections. A mechanic father of one student brought along an air horn to the competitions. We crossed boundaries. Our energy shook up the world of ballroom dance. If the judging seemed unfair, we would boycott, making protests that were not strictly ballroom, as though we were the outlaw renegades of the dance world.

  Old friends from other dance academies back in Brooklyn also began joining our community. This was another breakthrough development, because while private lessons are one thing, what is most important for kids are group classes. The students feed off each other’s energy and commitment, and the lessons become a series of friendly, informal competitions. That is how you breed excellence, by having excellence standing next to you.

  We built a business around family. Did that make Rising Stars a family business? Maybe. Family businesses have this kind of small-town essence to them. What that really means, I guess, is heart. We were turning into a big company, too, but one that was built on the morals and atmosphere of a tight-knit family business. That’s what helped make us approachable.

  Three years after we started, the school that had begun with seven kids at a studio open house was able to foster a national champion in the Junior 1 age category, a Junior 2 champion, and multiple finalists and semi-finalists as well. Somehow the crazy, makeshift organization of the school was able to work magic. With Maks as the artistic focus, my dad as administrator, my mother as the power behind the throne, and me as a model student, the package turned out to be a winning formula.

  Five years after we started, Rising Stars Dance Academy had developed into one of the premier dance education programs in the country. Everybody in the Chmerkovskiy family concentrated on the school, and it represented a huge chapter in our lives. Maks and I met most of our best friends there. No one could ever understand me or my family without having a sense of what Rising Stars meant to all of us.

  We were swimming in success, but not in money. The realization came only gradually, but there was a fundamental flaw in the business plan. It took a major change in direction before we could remedy the situation, a vital next step that would lead to astonishing transformations in all our lives.

  Choices

  As the older son, Maks willingly accepted the responsibilities our family handed him, but doing so had a huge impact on the adult he would become. The most extreme example of my brot
her’s sacrifice came while he was in his early twenties, when his role in life was still strictly limited to teaching at Rising Stars.

  It has always been hard for me to separate Maks my brother from Maks my teacher. As long as I’ve known him, which is as long as I’ve been alive, he’s taught me, first informally as an older sibling and then formally as a dance teacher. Actually, he became more and more a dance coach, rather than just a teacher, which is a crucial distinction. A teacher can show you the steps. A coach focuses on the larger picture. A coach can put you on the winner’s platform.

  Maks’s style of teaching has always been strict. He could be brutal, demanding, disdainful—and that was if he was in a good mood. He wasn’t an iron hand in a velvet glove, because with him, the glove came off and got tossed away, or had never been put on in the first place. It was tough love all the way, and although sometimes the emphasis was on the “tough” and not the “love” part of the equation, I thrived under it.

  Maybe because he was teaching constantly, Maks was forever stressed out. He was totally invested in the students, but naturally he wanted success for himself, in his own individual career in ballroom dance competitions. The tension between his teaching duties and his own ambitions weighed heavily on him.

  Even while working sixty-hour weeks at Rising Stars, Maks tried out with partners who were high in the competitive dance world hierarchy, which was much more developed in Europe than in the States. Europe offered a viable career path, a big-league opportunity that could give my brother freedom for the rest of his life, both financial freedom and freedom as a person.

  But a terrible conflict lay at the heart of my brother’s dreams, because Rising Stars Dance Academy simply could not survive without him. My father had his entire life invested in the school, and our family’s financial security depended upon it. Since Pops had no idea how to dance, he never tried to teach—he believed that would have been an insult to the craft. He would never dream of hustling anybody in that particular way. He was only going to do what he was great at, and it wasn’t dancing.