As my parents built a friendship with Jhanna, my father began to open up to her, a little more after each family dinner we shared, a little closer after each round of vodka. It was as if she were peeling away at my dad’s thick, gruff layers in the course of a series of dinner conversations. At first, he dismissed out of hand the ideas that she would throw his way, but then he slowly began warming to them.
Soon enough, I noticed the pronouns had shifted in Jhanna’s conversation, switching from “you” to “we.” As I said, my family was a “we” kind of environment.
Together, my parents and Jhanna developed Dance With Me, a social dance studio aimed at adults. With Maks as lead instructor and me with my national and international competition trophies, Dance With Me was an immediate success. We opened more branches, still trying to retain the warm, community feeling that was featured at Rising Stars.
In all our enterprises, we insisted on keeping that family environment. The heart was going to always be there, we told ourselves, and we were never going to sell out. The emphasis would always be on people, never on how beautiful our decor was, or how fancy our chandeliers were, or how clean-cut, suited-up, and fresh our staff was going to be—even though all those would be true in our case. My father’s pride, Jhanna’s ability to create a high-end product with superior execution and beautiful attention to details, and their shared work ethic and the camaraderie between them formed the foundation of what Dance With Me ultimately became.
Jhanna didn’t stop there.
“Why don’t we start a nonprofit organization to support dance instruction?” she asked. “We could call it ‘DanceTeam USA.’”
She suggested ways such a move could benefit the world of ballroom.
“I have some rich friends, basically,” Jhanna told us. “What a nonprofit organization can do is receive donations that the donors can then write off. In return, you’d have a way to provide scholarships and sponsor competitions. Dance lessons are expensive. There are a lot of kids out there who can’t afford what Nicole and Ted’s family can.”
Like a one-woman rocketship fueled by enthusiastic energy and the spirit of philanthropy, Jhanna swept everything along in her wake. Rising Stars Dance Academy was already the leading school in the nation for instructing children in the art of ballroom dancing. Now, with DanceTeam USA and the Dance With Me studios, the Chmerkovskiy family began to widen its sphere of influence, becoming players in the dance world as a whole.
In the sometimes incestuous, claustrophobic world of ballroom, quite a bit of animosity arose over the alliance between my father and Jhanna, because outsiders rarely grasped that we were connecting on a level that had nothing to do with money or status, but instead had everything to do with passion and purpose.
Together, Jhanna and my dad embarked on different projects. He loved that we were expanding and enjoyed working with a savvy business partner. The mood was not always babies and butterflies, because as with any enterprise involving strong personalities there was some tension. These were two very passionate, stubborn people, and they bumped heads a lot of the time, but out of that friction came magic. My father believed that there was nothing wrong with confrontation, or with a couple of fiery people going at it hammer and tongs. As long as there was a common goal, he felt, there would be a great end result.
Operating as DanceTeam USA, we founded new competitions at the Junior and Youth age levels, the Grand Dance Sport Cup. We discovered a gorgeous, classic venue, the Grand Prospect Hall on Prospect Avenue in Park Slope, in Brooklyn, which reminded all of us, Jhanna included, of an Eastern European ballroom auditorium. I loved the large Victorian-era building, which featured an exterior in the French Renaissance style, a soaring entrance lobby with an ornate gilded ceiling, twin marble staircases, and plenty of room inside for a dance competition.
It was perfect. The event could be an escape for young kids to play dress up and be little kings and queens for the day. Why not put them in a place where they could really feel like royalty?
We had the space and we had the event, and finally we could link together a circuit for Junior-level competition that would help reshape the dance landscape in the whole country. Young ballroom students now had a series of events and a point system similar to professional level competition.
They say as one door closes another opens, but the opposite is also true. By opening the multiple doors of DanceTeam USA, Dance With Me, and the Grand Dance Sport World Cup, Jhanna and my father helped broaden a world formerly limited to Rising Stars Dance Academy.
But just down the line another door would slam shut from two thousand miles away, robbing us of our very own rising star, the hardest working stallion in the family stable, a figure that everyone else in the core gang of four revolved around. Out of that development, in turn, came success on a whole other level, breaking our world open as though it were a piñata, showering us all with candy.
In Hollywood during that same period, without any of us knowing anything about it, a reality TV show was taking shape, with an odd format that paired celebrities with professional ballroom dancers.
Lust
Before I started competing on Dancing with the Stars, I’d had just seven partners over my entire competitive dance career—deep, serious, long-lasting relationships that for me formed the most important bonds outside those with my family. The decision to leave a partner was always an agonizing one, and likewise, the decision to take on a new partner was huge. By comparison, Dancing with the Stars has created a totally different, somewhat unreal and artificial situation whereby I have had to take a different partner every season.
But whether stretching over years in reality or compressed into a short three months on reality TV, competing as a ballroom dance couple represented a total immersion in another person’s being. I got to know everything about my partner, her laughter and her tears, what motivated her, what left her cold. Over the course of the rehearsal period, I would discover how she looked, felt, sounded, smelled—all the senses except taste, I guess, but some of these women could have activated the taste buds pretty well, too.
It has seemed to me that the obvious comparison was marriage, and some of the same dynamics applied. If my partner and I were growing as a dance couple, then the relationship was healthy, but if we were stale creatively, I’d know we were in trouble. Since I have never been married, the comparison could be false in any number of ways and I wouldn’t know it. But I understand that the intense, heightened feeling of dance is similar to lovemaking, involving supercharged episodes of sensual communication between a man and woman.
Or, for me in my younger days, between a boy and a girl. I took dance lessons and entered competitions long before I ever had sex. It was an odd situation, because in one way or another ballroom is all about sex, or, to put it a more academic way, ballroom is a highly stylized performance activity based on the exchanges and postures involved in human sexuality. So when I started taking lessons at age four I lacked a fundamental understanding of what I was doing. It was like learning to drive a car on a closed racecourse without knowing anything about steering a vehicle in traffic.
I felt like a very lucky man when I reached adulthood, because ballroom helped me learn how to approach a woman, how to relate with sensitivity to another human being, how to embrace the lessons of chivalry and empathy. From a very young age I was in close physical proximity with the opposite sex. We had to touch, hold hands, embrace, and do it all without losing our shit. The social awkwardness that other kids went through totally disappeared under constant, almost daily contact. Relating to a girl on a one-to-one basis simply became a natural part of my young life.
In contrast, during youth sports, say, players weren’t normally exposed to the opposite sex at all. Being on an all-boys team tended to reinforce preconceptions about girls, rather than work to dismantle childish prejudices.
Because I started learning ballroom at such a young age, sex was in my life for a long time before I even knew what it wa
s, an 800-pound gorilla I lived with even though we had never been formally introduced. Later on, when I showed up in Brooklyn, I was plunged into a culture that was very different from my Eastern European background, and it took me a while to get my bearings. In America, the reality of the street was hot and wild and loose in ways it could never be in Odessa. I witnessed violence in the hood, yes, but I also encountered a sexually charged atmosphere that was intoxicating, mystifying, and frightening all at the same time.
Even with all that, I didn’t get into self-pleasuring until I was eleven or twelve, and I didn’t have my first real girlfriend until a couple years later, when puberty hit me like a truck. I was fourteen, but with braces I looked like a solid thirteen. She was sixteen, and hung out with eighteen- or nineteen-year-old dudes who smoked cigarettes and drove.
Of course she was a dancer. I have always loved dancers, not only because they share the social circle that I move in, but because dancers are just naturally tuned to the world of sensuality and romance. She danced in an older, under-twenty-one category, so at first I encountered her only from afar, as a spectator.
I don’t think I’d ever really looked at girls like that before in my life. But when I gazed at her dancing with a partner, displaying all the elaborate moves of ballroom, I felt a sick urgency to be near her, to spend time with her, to hear her speak. Watching her dance was a revelation. It was as if after all those years I suddenly understood what ballroom was all about.
Lilya, beautiful Lilya. She was a Brooklyn girl, which meant you could add ten years to her chronological age in order to understand her level of sophistication and cool. She came out of the Russian immigrant community, and that helped us to connect over our common background. But because I was living in Jersey with my parents and had no access to a car, we were impossibly separated geographically.
What was love? I had no idea back then, but even as a kid I’d always had an appetite for more, a questing, restless, hungry attitude toward the world, lusting for more experience, more sensations, more more. Whether it was turning ambition into art, or approaching competition either on the dance floor or on the basketball court, that same instinct sustained me. Right from the start, the hunger followed me into my love life and my interest in women.
What did I want from Lilya? More.
Grown-up, fully developed sexual attraction was something I was feeling in my body for the first time. This wasn’t the puppy love I’d felt for Vanessa back in grade school. I had never before experienced a type of desire so overwhelming.
At the same time, I was definitely punching above my weight class, and there was no way in hell that I had a chance with this girl. Though I had started to man up a little bit, I still had braces, like I said, and how was I going to kiss with a mouth full of prickly metal?
Lilya didn’t dance at our studio, but was at a Brooklyn dance academy where my best friend took lessons. But within our little world of ballroom, I was the alpha kid in my age group, so of course she saw me, she knew me.
We went to some of the same competitions, and at one, the Ohio Star Ball, I sat behind her with my two best friends, Igor and Alex. I thought she probably saw us as a trio of gnats buzzing around her head, but an amazing thing occurred.
I said something funny and Lilya laughed.
Oh my God, I could now die happy.
“I think I have a shot with her,” I whispered to my buds. They howled, dismissing the whole idea. Later, when Lilya left her seat and walked away, I turned to them.
“I’ll make you a bet,” I said. “I’m going to win her over.”
They thought I was out of my mind. The prospect was so far beyond the realm of possibility that they only laughed at me. But it wasn’t the first time I heard naysayers mock my ambitions.
Later that night, after the competition, Lilya and I ended up in a room together, among friends, and we all started playing a game of Truth or Dare. Somebody dared her to make out with me. To this day I owe that kid a solid. It was the greatest thing in the world. From that point on, and for the next half year, Lilya and I were constantly in touch through AIM.
For the first time in my life, I almost flunked one of my classes. My grades dipped dramatically in ninth grade, because I was chasing this girl. Every night I would wait for everybody to go to sleep, log in on the computer, and instant message with her. I always worried that the electronic squeal of a dial-up internet connection—something not many people remember nowadays—might wake my parents.
We would “talk,” and I suddenly became Shakespeare. That’s really where all my writing comes from, the source from which everything else flowed: writing poetry to Lilya trying to win her heart.
At that time, what was I except a kid with nothing? I had no car, and I still slept on a bunk bed in a second-floor apartment in Garfield, New Jersey. Garfield. Even the name of the town made me sound like a loser. I couldn’t pull up stakes and move to a more prestigious address, couldn’t suddenly materialize a driver’s license and a car. I had to work with what I had. I took up smoking Marlboros, figuring that looking cool was worth the risk to my health.
Making a catalog of all my pluses and minuses, I came up with a precious few of the first and a lot more of the latter. I realized that on the plus side I didn’t possess much more than ambition and intellect. But even back then I grasped a simple fact of life, that there was nothing more sexy to a woman than a man with talent and ambition. If you also had a brain attached to that combination—and with me the jury was still out in that respect—you were golden.
I was still determined to move my relationship with Lilya from the digital to the physical, from AIM to something real. We never danced. Or rather, Lilya and I never partnered, never entered competitions as a couple. She danced competitively with a kid who was eighteen. At that point I was dancing up an age level, competing with fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds. Not only were Lilya and her partner older, they were better dancers than me and my partner. I continually felt defeated and deflated. All my poetry, all our online messaging amounted to nothing. Whatever we had together—whatever it was—was still secret, intimidating, and impossible.
“Lilya is totally out of your reach,” whispered a small interior voice, the voice of failure.
We had started talking in November 2000—and it wasn’t talking, really, just online communicating—and a month later we ended up at the same New Year’s Eve party. I had heard through the grapevine that Lilya would be there, and though the obstacles against me seemed insurmountable, I vowed that I would somehow make it to that party. But I was stuck at a New Year’s celebration with my parents, which was a tradition in our family. I had to beg my brother for help.
“You’ve got to get me out of this party and into that party in Brooklyn,” I told Maks. “Please! Tell the parental units some shit, anything—vouch for me, bro! Tell them it’ll be all right for me to do this.”
Not for the first time and not for the last, Maks came through for me. He finagled permission from our mom and dad, then drove me to Brooklyn and dropped me off at the party.
I was ecstatic. That first taste of adulthood was the sweetest thing ever. First, I was drinking and, second, I was smoking cigarettes. For the wunderkind from Garfield, New Jersey who always did what he was told, it was heaven. I knew everybody there, but they were older, so underneath my surface bravado I knew I was bluffing.
Nothing happened between Lilya and me. Being together at that party represented only the most limited kind of interaction, because Lilya seemed to be caught inside this cloud of insane sexual energy. Other dudes constantly buzzed around her. She was the sun, and I was like the moon, with no light of my own except what little reflected off her, constantly eclipsed by the shadows of all her male friends.
That night left me heartbroken. What had I expected—some sort of reverse Cinderella tale where I was magically transformed into a prince? Instead, I was like, Damn, is that all there was?
But then the next day she reached out agai
n. As far as I could understand through the medium of instant messenger, she was in love with me just as much as I was in love with her.
I sent flowers to her on Valentine’s Day. In late February, I cut school and we met at Battery Park in Lower Manhattan. It was so wintry that the whole city seemed frozen solid. The wind knifed in off the harbor as we took a walk in the chilling-ass cold.
Purely as a matter of survival, I thought our only option was to get as close as two humans could possibly get. Oh, it was one of those slow-motion young-love moments, where we beat around the bush for a second and then just jumped into each other’s hearts, with the greatest taste of joy, I think, that I had ever felt up until that point.
We made out and that was it, that was when we swore our love, right then and there among the shrieking seagulls.
From that point forward we might have been technically and officially dating, but I still lived in Garfield and still was too busy studying ballroom and violin. I didn’t talk to anyone about this most monumental development in my life—except, of course, for telling my boys that they had lost the bet and to pay up. Lilya and I developed a kind of long-distance, interstate, greater New York metropolitan area, Brooklyn-to-Jersey relationship.
Two months later, I ended up losing my virginity to her.
Forgetting that Lilya herself was also very young, just sixteen, I had this whole mistaken notion that she was somehow very experienced in the ways of love. I was just a kid, while she had grown men looking at her. But she was in love with me and didn’t want anybody but me, because, as I said, there was nothing sexier than talent and ambition with a little bit of intellect thrown in.
Ahh, fuck yeah.
That spring I turned fifteen and she turned seventeen. I wanted to be older for her, more mature, more experienced. I asked myself, Where are the notches on my belt? I thought I had to have a bunch of notches, a bunch of sexual conquests, so Lilya would see me as fully grown up.
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