I'll Never Change My Name

by Valentin Chmerkovskiy

  “Listen, he doesn’t want to have tryouts,” Maks told Kimmins. “He’s not interested in tryouts, doesn’t like them, doesn’t want them. We have our mind set on somebody and it isn’t Lera.”

  But Maks was working on the other side of the fence, too, trying to convince me. “Look,” he said. “This guy just keeps calling. You don’t want to piss off the president of the Dance Federation, do you?”

  I had recently lost a competition at Blackpool, England, taking second by one mark. Among the thirteen adjudicators that day had been John Kimmins, and he had cast a tie-breaking ballot in the finals.

  Going in, I had been ecstatic because it was the first time I had seen an American judge at Blackpool; in the past the judging panel was comprised solely of old British farts who made Len Goodman look like Brad Pitt in his prime. I thought I would have politics working in my favor for once. But Kimmins consistently marked me as second, and his mark was the deciding factor. If he would have given one first place—not five, just one, in a single one of the dances—I would have taken first at Blackpool.

  I never placed the blame on him, because I should never have let it get that close. But you expect support from the people who represent the same flag as you. Maybe to him I was just some Russian kid from Brooklyn. Half a year later, I wasn’t exactly holding a grudge, because everything happens for a reason, right? But I shut down Kimmins when I talked to Maks.

  “I’m not going to listen to that dude,” I said to my brother. “I don’t give a fuck about who’s president of anything. It’s not like these guys do me any favors anyway. We’ve always been free agents, we’ve been doing our own thing, and it’s worked out fine. We’re Monaco and he’s France. You know what I’m saying?”

  Maks did know what I was saying, all right, but he insisted I see Lera. So that Saturday, fresh off committing to a partnership with Julianne Hough the day before, I found myself in the Rising Stars studio, waiting for a woman I knew for certain I was going to turn down. I remember I had all my boys there, because they were all teaching or practicing, but also because once again I felt as though I needed backup.

  In came Valeriya. This chick was a fucking character. First of all, her presence. She was sexy and dark haired, with huge eyes and long legs. She looked like a Bond girl, maybe in From Russia with Love, only this was more like From Russia with Lust. She was the polar opposite of Julianne.

  I felt it instantly. Julianne was the girl next door, a Disney heroine, or maybe Jennifer Aniston, while here was Angelina Jolie, straight up. Lera had presence, an exotic kind of crazy energy. She was unconventional and clearly over the top, but in the most striking, most incredible, most Greek goddess way possible. She might have acted a little insane, but was insanely beautiful because of it.

  As soon as I saw her, my inner voice started mumbling shit, shit, shit, knowing that she was going to upend the apple cart. But I played it cool.

  “Hi! How are you?”

  “Harasho, vse, normalnya,” using Russian to answer, which was to me so extra, since she had lived in the States for years by this time. But like I said before, she was a character.

  She vaulted off to the changing room, and I looked over at my guys. Their eyes followed her out like she was the sexiest thing they had ever seen. She came back flustered and all over the place, and I was reminded again why I didn’t like tryouts, because of the stress they placed on the other person, and on myself.

  As she headed onto the dance floor, her shoe strap broke. I immediately took it for an omen. “Okay, God, thank you for the sign. Got you. Good.” The decision was going to be easy, then.

  But Lera had brought along another pair of shoes.

  She was wearing a dress designed by Espen Salberg, who was an ex-dancer, now a legendary coach and teacher. If there was a Mount Rushmore of ballroom dance, Salberg would be right up there. Like any ambitious, restless artist, he was eager to branch out. He got into dance fashion and then started making dresses. His style was totally, aggressively off the hook.

  Lera wore that black Salberg dress as though she had been born into it, and she didn’t bother with a bra, either. Everything about her was on a higher level of maturity than I was currently enjoying. I was just coming off a competition that was open to everyone under eighteen, and I was a fucking child compared to this woman.

  The male brain tends to become a little oxygen-starved at such moments, since all the blood is rushing to another part of the body. “Holy shit” was about the only kind of thought I could entertain. “She is so hot.”

  My brother stood by the music machine. I had my crew lined up and sitting against the wall, Kiki, Cole, Serge, Eugene, and Teddy, all of them. Lera, her nipples hard and poking through the dress, warmed up her long-ass legs by doing her rumba walks, exhibiting a physical confidence that filled the room. Thank God the boys were all sitting down, because otherwise it would have been a little embarrassing for everybody.

  Lera and I started dancing together, and we literally did two basic steps before I was seduced. I was seduced not only by her physical self, but by her energy. She had a different air about her, a subtle quality of movement that wasn’t so much athletic as artistic. Again, the way she moved rose to a whole other level of maturity. She was a woman, not just a talented girl. For the first time in my life, I felt as though I was dancing with an adult.

  I understood that in any partnership with Lera there would be a huge potential for me to grow, because I would have to step up and become a man in order to complement this woman, just to be able to stand next to her.

  That was it. She won me over. The challenge of it enticed me. I decided I wanted to dance with Lera, starting right at that moment and continuing into the foreseeable future.

  We did five steps and an overturn. The thin fabric of her dress moved with her. There was a minor wardrobe malfunction and we stopped abruptly.

  “Hey, let me go change,” she said.

  “Yeah, you should probably do that,” I said, practically choking on the words. She left the room, and I turned around and all my boys were sitting there with their mouths open and their thumbs up. I looked over at my brother.

  “Maks, what do you think?”

  “Bro, I’ve never seen you be able to create this kind of image before. This is the shit that you’re a fan of. When we watch and we like who we watch, this is what we like.”

  I was sold. Lera and I finished the tryout and said our goodbyes.

  “Okay, well, see you later?” she said, letting the question trail off.

  “Yeah, we’ll give you a call,” I said, feeling foolish.

  “Okay, ladna harasho,” she said—“okay, cool”—giving me a slight kiss on the cheek as she left.

  My brother and I drove home, and I had one word to say to him: “Blyaaaat.”

  That was a curse word in Russian, one of the most common expressions from Moscow to Odessa and beyond. The literal definition was “whore,” but it was a tofu word, taking on the flavor of the context around it, so it could just as well mean “shit,” “fuck,” or “wow,” depending on the speaker’s intention.

  “What are we gonna do?” I wailed to Maks. “Blyat, blyat, blyat! We had this whole plan. It’s Saturday, and we’ve got Julianne flying in on Monday. What the fuck are we gonna do?”

  “Bro,” Maks said, all sober-like since it wasn’t his problem, “it is what it is. What do you want to do? Do you want to dance with Lera, or do you want to just go ahead and dance with Julianne?”

  I owed Julianne. She had just dropped everything, put off a recording session in Los Angeles to fly to New Jersey and dance with me. I felt like a complete asshole. I had promised Julianne. Was I going to let a simple little nip-slip turn my head? That would be a dick move, and I knew it.

  Unaware of the drama going down on my end, Julianne’s father called my father.

  “Hey, this is Bruce Hough,” he began crisply. “This partnership idea with your young son and my Julianne? I just want you to underst
and that I’m totally against it. I don’t even know where Saddle Brook, New Jersey, is. If she does end up coming out there, which I’m totally against, she has to stay with a Mormon family somewhere in the area, good people who could introduce her at their temple.”

  My dad was at a loss. “What? What? First of all, I don’t even know whether Mormons exist here in New Jersey. I thought they all were confined to Utah.”

  At that point in time—at pretty much any point in time—my dad had a hundred thousand things to worry about, beyond trying to track down a Mormon family in his immediate vicinity.

  “Blyaaaat,” he said to himself and hung up the phone.

  What was good about Bruce’s phone call, I realized when Pops told me about it, was that at least it gave us some sort of excuse for why a partnership with Julianne might not work out. Otherwise we had none, nothing, nada. Julianne had just changed all her plans for this thing, and I felt terrible. We felt terrible, the Chmerkovskiy “we”—Maks, Dad, Mom, and myself. We all felt ourselves in the wrong, and that just didn’t feel right.

  I felt terrible, but I was that type of person—I had tunnel vision and I could not help it. That’s my normal MO: I obsess. I don’t admire, I don’t love, I obsess. When I wanted to dance with Julianne, she totally entered into my head. Then Lera came along and swept all those thoughts clean. All I could think about was the look and feelings that I had when I was dancing with her. That was it. I didn’t care about anything else. I never want to second-guess myself. I see what I see. I feel what I feel, and I go for what I want. I don’t question it.

  We went home, where my dad said, “Listen, you’ve got to make the call to Julianne.”

  My brother said, “Just man up. It’s not the end of the fucking world. Just talk to her.”

  My mother chimed in: “Call her, Valya.”

  In the meantime, Valeriya was also under the gun herself. I heard a rumor that Shirley Ballas, the mother of Julianne’s former partner, Mark, was pressuring Lera to come to England and try out with Derek, who was Shirley’s student and like a son to her.

  Along with her husband Corky, Shirley was a major power in the ballroom world, the self-styled “Queen of Latin.” She and Corky had not only raised Mark and their whole family of other champions, but also mentored the Houghs, both Derek and Julianne.

  Shirley wanted Lera for Derek, and what Shirley wanted in ballroom she usually got. Lera texted me, her words seeming to come out breathless from a lack of commas. “What is the prospect here because I need to figure out what I’m doing because I don’t want to go to England I want to dance with you but I need to know this—pazhallusta [please]!”

  “Well, first you didn’t want to piss John Kimmins off,” Maks said, laughing off my predicament. “Now you’re going to piss Shirley Ballas off. Good luck with your results next year, buddy.”

  I felt like I was James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. “You’re tearing me apart!”

  I was stuck. It was now Saturday night. I had just finished a semester at school, so we had plans to celebrate. My brother and I were in the car, heading out for the night, and he would not let up.

  “This is dumb. You’ll have plenty of Saturday nights in your life. Meantime, Julianne’s flying in Monday morning. You’ve got to get on the phone and tell her you’re calling it off.”

  “I can’t,” I said pathetically. “I just had a conversation with her about flying out here and how, like, we were going to put her up and take care of everything. I can’t call her now and tell her, ‘Hey, by the way, all that shit I promised you? None of that is happening because we’re not dancing with you.’”

  I turned to Maks with a big-eyed kid brother look that had worked with him when I was young. “Will you call her?”

  He exploded. “No! I can’t fucking call her. It’s your mess, you clean it up.”

  “Please, bro, will you? I really can’t do it.”

  “Shut up. Just make the call. You’re seriously pissing me off.”

  I sank back in the car seat. “Okay, okay, I’ll call. But listen, let’s pick up our boys first, okay?”

  As always, I needed backup to inject a little steel in my spine. We were on our way to collect Eugene and Andre at work, and when we got there, I left Maks in the car while I went in to fetch the boys. I found them hanging out in a stairwell, the smell of weed strong and potent.

  “Want some?” Eugene asked, offering the joint to me.

  “Are you kidding?” I was stressed out and needed a break from reality.

  When we got back to Maks, waiting in the car, he knew instantly we were all high as apple pie.

  “Bro, what the fuck?” he asked, clearly disgusted.

  “Listen,” I babbled. “I’m in no position to call. You have to.”

  I admit, I was a coward about it. My brother was the one who ended up getting on the phone and breaking a girl’s heart.

  “Hey, listen, Julianne,” Maks said smoothly, “we decided to go in a different direction and we’re sorry and blah blah blah.” I tuned his actual words out, unable to listen.

  Julianne was indeed upset, but what was there to be said? “Okay, cool,” she sighed, practical and gracious as ever. Then, to be fair, I did end up speaking with her the next day, when my brain got unscrambled and I was able to apologize like a human being.

  Choosing Lera as a partner wound up being the biggest favor I could ever do for Julianne. Yes, she might have been heartbroken because of all my foolishness. She never did return to ballroom competition, with me or with anyone else. But a short year later a certain reality TV show about ballroom dancing came along, and with that a young star was born named Julianne Hough. She ended up doing the show, released her amazing country albums, and became a huge Hollywood star.

  If it hadn’t been for a single little innocent nip-slip, who knows? Julianne and I might be married right now, or dancing and competing as partners. It’s crazy how the world works. Sometimes the things that don’t happen have the biggest impact on your life—not the things that do happen.

  I look back and marvel about Maks and me and Julianne and Mark and Derek, the multiplying connections we all have, originally arising from the limited world of ballroom, but now magnified by the wide world of television. Our relationships stem from a series of small, mostly unknown episodes, but, man, do we go back.

  “It’s a small world,” said the comedian Steven Wright, “but I wouldn’t want to paint it.”

  At the time, the whole business with Julianne and Lera was fairly unbearable, though in hindsight it makes me laugh. I just hope all my future problems turn out so well for everyone.

  The Ukrainian Bachelor

  I didn’t go with them, but my brother and dad returned to Odessa in 2007, visiting the old hometown. It might have been a mistake. The city looked terrible, they reported, its shit gone gray and dreary. My father and Maks found the old estate house with the courtyard, and I think my dad might have shed a tear about how rundown the place was, how there was little upkeep, how the building appeared to be somehow sinking back into the earth.

  As much as his heart still felt connected to Ukraine, my father saw the visit as a sad confirmation that he had done the right thing for his kids. Maybe we were all delusional about what our surroundings looked like when Maks and I were little. Or maybe the old homestead struck my brother and father as shabby because of how we now lived in America, which had such a different environment and different style of energy.

  The separation between Ukraine and the States showed itself not merely in the physical things, but also in a mentality among the residents, a vibe in the air. This is not to say that our Ukrainian life was hard and our American life has been easy. Our lives in the States have never been easy, but as poor as we were at first, at least moving to the States had turned out to be worth the discomfort. The lack of ease was justified. You’ve got to pay your dues to live in this amazing beauty of a country. Hard work is worthwhile because it pays off. In Ukraine, nothing
paid off. Hard work was just . . . hard work.

  In America you could have goals and make progress. Everything seems possible. But back home (I still catch myself saying “home” for Ukraine, when really I know in my heart that America is my home) there was this depressing, defeated attitude. What exactly am I paying my dues for? Oh, I remember now! I’ve got to pay my dues to get the hell out of this country!

  I’ve returned to Ukraine only a few times in my adult life, but have never yet gone back to Odessa. If only because my grandfather was buried there, I know that at some point in the future I’ll make the pilgrimage. It’s as if I’m saving up the experience for when my days and ways quiet down a bit, when I possess the emotional balance to make the trip meaningful.

  I had a near miss with my old hometown in 2009, when I spent some time in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, three hundred miles to the north of Odessa. Typical for that period of my life, I was at a ballroom dance competition when the opportunity arose to go to Kiev, and since the competition was being held in Moscow, I was at least in the same time zone.

  I got a call from my brother. “Hey, yo, can you do me a favor?” Maks asked.

  The producers of the Ukrainian version of the hit reality show The Bachelor had contacted him, he said. Maks’s first impulse was to turn them down flat.

  “It’s a crazy idea,” he told me. “I don’t think I want to do it.”

  The producers heard that I was in Moscow, and suggested I might act as my brother’s scout in Kiev.

  “Yo, they’ll fly you down there,” Maks said. “Just meet with them, give me the overall scope of things, and tell me what you think.”

  I was there for two days, during which the producers wined and dined me to within an inch of my life. If you’ve ever experienced Ukrainian hospitality, and can recall the fog of toasts and banqueting, you know what I mean. My hosts were execs from the STB network, which operated Ukraine’s most popular commercial channel. They had licensed the rights to The Bachelor concept from Warner Bros., creating what they called Holostyak, Russian for “bachelor.”