Then my pride spoke up. “Yo, we’re good.”
It sounded crazy but that was how it played out in my head.
“We’re good here,” said pride. “I’m so proud of you.” At that moment pride had taken on a Mister Rogers kind of tone.
“But you’ve got this other shit to do. You know, go do it, bro! Stop trying to satisfy me, because I’m proud of you. You’ve had a long career, nineteen years all told, almost two decades.”
My mind flashed back through my partners, my friends, my teachers, my mentors, my coaches, Moms and Pops and Maks and everyone else, the lessons, the competitions, Blackpool, Palm Beach, Moscow, Italy. I was nothing but a dead-broke dancer. How could I have hit all these wonderful places? Some wealthy dude I’d run into would be nattering on about spending time in Capri, and I could say, “Oh, yeah, dope, I’ve spent time in Ischia.” What? How did you possibly manage that?
During my competitive career I always kept three responsibilities firmly in mind: to myself, to others, and to the art of dancing itself. That was my holy trinity. I never wanted to be a part of something where I wasn’t giving my everything to all three. If I didn’t take care of my responsibility to myself, then I was destined to fail with the other two. And at that precise moment during the samba at Blackpool, I knew I wasn’t being true to number one. It was the oxygen mask situation on an airplane: be sure to put your own mask on before you try to help anyone else. You can’t do anyone any good if you pass out.
For the first time in my entire life, I had been taking dance for granted. I knew I would be marked to advance to the next round, so I was just going through the motions. But without heart, my dance was empty. It was nothing.
Finally, my pride gave me permission to let go.
All this happened in a frozen second, in the midst of that one volta.
Dasha and I took third at Blackpool that year. But I thought that we should have been fifth, and the guy who was twelfth should have been third, and the couple who was first should have been thirteenth. But I understood that wasn’t how things worked. “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” As I left Blackpool I remember feeling such love and affection for every single person on the floor, really for everyone in the world of competitive dance, doubling down on the emotion because I knew I would be leaving them.
A thousand thoughts whirled around in my head. I was writing a lot of rap and poetry at the time, and I had fantasies of pouring all my energies into a music career. I really thought I could do it, and I still think I could—I just, um, haven’t found my sound yet. Or maybe I’ll make one last desperation run at a career in the NBA . . .
And if I missed competitive dance? I hadn’t burned any bridges or slammed shut any doors. I was younger than most of the current champions. I could take off for three years and still come back in my prime. Right at the moment, though, I simply didn’t want to haul that train anymore.
I texted Maks. “Bro, I think I’m done competing.”
My dear brother, bless his heart. I had told him the same thing many times, six years before, five years, three years, out of frustration with this or that situation, and he had always responded with encouragement to keep at it. Well, this time lo and behold Maks replied simply and differently.
“Bro, it’s about time.”
The Dancing with the Stars folks had been contacting me off and on over the years, peppering me with invitations, either through Maks or face-to-face whenever I was in L.A., wanting me to join the show. With my focus on the competition world, I always politely put them off. The show was Maks’s thing, I thought. My thing was Blackpool, the German Open, international championships. Of course, since my brother had been my first and by far my most influential teacher, my thing was Maks’s thing, too. I was proof positive of his genius as a mentor.
“Do you think they’re still interested in me at DWTS?” I texted.
“I dunno,” he texted back. “Let me text them and ask.”
“Text them??!!!”
“Okay, all right, let me call them.”
I still had to break the news to my partner. We were already committed to a competition in Shenzhen, China, outside of Hong Kong. I couldn’t refuse to go to that, but otherwise, I had to tell her we were finished.
The whole business was complicated by the fact that my family had basically rescued Dasha from a shitty, going-nowhere situation in Ukraine. I had reached out and asked her to dance as my partner, and the next day she was on a plane to the States. It was as if she jumped from high school and got drafted straight into the NBA. Plus she quite literally found a new home with us, moving in with my parents in New Jersey. Now our run was ending.
“Dasha, I think I’m done competing,” I said. “I think China’s going to be it.”
She was heartbroken. She started crying. Her life as a competitive dancer was just beginning, but her first thought wasn’t even about that. She needed parents. She needed family.
“Can I still live with you guys?”
“Jesus, of course, yes!” I said, heartbroken myself by the question. I stumbled trying to reassure her, but the words tumbled out. “Yes, yes, you are not— You know, this isn’t a breakup. We don’t have a business arrangement, okay? We have a people arrangement. We’re still people and we love you and will still love you and no way we’re ever going to turn our backs on you.”
The tears kept coming. Sniffle, sniffle, weep, weep. Much more of this and I was going to start crying, too.
“Competing together or not, I still want to see you succeed.”
Sniffle, sniffle.
“Hey, do you want to maybe come with me to Dancing with the Stars? Maybe you want to do that?” Dasha’s English wasn’t that good, so the producers probably weren’t going to consider her for a position as a pro and give her a celebrity partner, but there was always the show’s dance troupe. And she did later join the show as a troupe dancer, which kind of put a Band-Aid on the wound of me leaving her as a partner.
Eventually, Dasha also went back to competition. But she lived with my parents in Jersey for about a year and a half after that, until she got her bearings and was ready to make a go of it on her own. She went on to be ranked number two in the world.
Beyond my partner, I still had one more person to tell of my decision to leave competition, and this was a conversation I dreaded most of all. I had to inform my dad.
I went to him like a man and we had something of a heart-to-heart about it. By the expression on his face I could read the heartbreak he was feeling. More than anyone else, even more than Maks or my mother, my father lived that whole competition life through me. He had been at my side throughout. The image of him proudly waving the Stars and Stripes at the 2001 Junior Worlds remained fresh in my mind.
The conversation we had marked the beginning of a transformation in our relationship. It was the Chmerkovskiy family equivalent of the moment many kids have at eighteen or nineteen, when they leave the nest to head off to college. Just like most parents in that situation, my dad was sad and proud at the same time.
“Well,” he said, “finally you’re sticking up for yourself.” At that moment, I loved his response more than anything in the world. It was as if his words made me realize the door of the cage had been left open and I was free to fly.
Ashley Edens and Joe Sungkur, two producers on Dancing with the Stars, called me, both of them on the phone at once.
“We’d love to have you!” Ashley said. In Hollywood everyone talks in exclamation points.
“It’ll be an incredible season!” Joe added.
“Cool!” I said. Now I was doing it, too. “When do I come in?”
“In August—August eighteenth,” they replied, talking over each other.
My whole life has been an audition. But this time I didn’t have to try out or show my chops or impress the gatekeepers. I didn’t have to find an agent. I didn’t hire a manager. I didn’t even have to kiss too much ass. My victories on the ballroom circuit spoke f
or me.
I was twenty-five, and I was going to Hollywood.
LEAVING THE FIELD OF COMPETITION USUALLY INVOLVES AN announcement at a dancer’s final event, an opportunity to be feted, petted, and praised. You get on the mic and say your thank-yous. My last competition was off the usual circuit, in China, so any sort of formal leave-taking wasn’t in the cards. Dasha and I won and were invited to perform the last unjudged “honor dance” that was traditionally awarded to champions.
I danced my final dance without anybody in the audience realizing that it was my final dance. It was a special moment. The only ones present who understood what was happening were three couples in the competition who were my friends. They knew, and they were all bawling.
Still, the occasion wasn’t the ceremonial public goodbye that retiring dancers customarily made. Instead, that summer I sent a semiofficial letter to DanceBeat magazine, then the leading media outlet for the ballroom world. I needed closure. I wasn’t just going to bounce and not say my thank-yous.
I tried to use the announcement as a lever for change in the world of ballroom competition, which was then tangled in bureaucracy and red tape. As in boxing, where there are no undisputed champions anymore, with separate belts awarded by the WBO, WBA, WBC, and IBF, ballroom had split into competing federations. I bemoaned the impact the split had upon the lives of dancers.
I emphasized how hard it was to be a ballroom dancer on the competition circuit. For years, my inspiration arose from the community, from the opportunity to be able to compete against the best in the world. None of us were doing it for the money, because there wasn’t any. Now with the flurry of sanctions and the competing organizations, the only incentive we ever had was being diminished. A stupid bureaucratic clause meant that I could not compete against Nino Langella, for example. My letter was a plea from the ranks.
Within the small, cloistered community of ballroom dancing, the news broke huge and the buzz was crazy. I fielded dozens of calls from all over the world. A few dance blogs that were popping at the time reposted the letter, and suddenly it was all over the internet, translated into six languages. It was as though I had offered myself up as a martyr to the cause—the fight to make life easier for the poor, beleaguered dancers competing in the thankless, moneyless competition world. The activist call for change actually ignited a movement, resulting in a realignment of the competitive circuit.
In the final paragraph, I sounded a valedictory note:
I am who I am because of dance, music, and self-expression. I will continue on my journey of self-enlightenment through dance, music, and self-expression, but it will be through different avenues. I will forever champion the principles I acquired through the world of Ballroom Dancing. I will forever be grateful for the memories I was so fortunate to have. I walk away from competition a humbled man, a grateful man, but most importantly an inspired man. I am inspired to reach new heights and pinnacles in my future endeavors; however, I will never forget the world that raised me and shaped me into the man I am today.
Nuff said.
IN AUGUST 2011, I MOVED INTO A RENTED HOUSE IN THE HILLS of West Hollywood, sharing it with Maks, Dasha, and Teddy Volynets, Jhanna’s kid, who was also a member of the Dancing with the Stars troupe for Season 13. We lived just a couple of blocks up from the Viper Room, Whisky a Go Go, and the rest of the clubs that made Sunset Strip the most crowded stretch of crazy in L.A. I didn’t “go Hollywood” so much as I jammed locally on the Strip. For a hot second that summer, I seized the opportunity to be a rock star.
Los Angeles has the most beautiful people in the world, at least aesthetically. Intellectually, not always. They’re like the weather: gorgeous and warm and just a tad bit boring. Every once in a while I would feel myself missing the street life in Brooklyn, remembering the lines from one of Neil Simon’s plays: “When it’s 100 degrees in New York, it’s 72 in Los Angeles. When it’s 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it’s still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles.”
When there was fantasy involved, reality got suspended. People in L.A. were caught up in a dream world. There was nothing more addicting than the Hollywood fantasy, because in a fantasy anything was possible. During those first days in Los Angeles I indulged in frantic waves of partying, letting myself go because I was experiencing such a sense of release on leaving the world of competition.
But in the back of my mind I heard a whisper. Don’t make the fantasy your whole world. Stay present. Stay focused. I was on a mission. I had just made a big statement, retiring from competition and presenting the ballroom world with all my righteous shit in the DanceBeat letter. Now it was time to put my money where my mouth was. Okay, okay, big shot with the big ideas. You’ve sold us all on your big-deal vision. Now let’s see how it plays out.
When the time came, I brushed the party cobwebs from my brain and headed down the hill to a soundstage on Beverly Boulevard, where I would take my place as a professional dancer on Dancing with the Stars.
Part 5
A Journey in Dance
Two Pair
Eleven seasons in as a professional dancer, now I was finally going into Dancing with the Stars not as a rookie, not as a newbie. After my triumph with Rumer, I was the reigning champion, a status I never had before. For my partner first meeting on Season 21, I drove north out of L.A. to the fancy suburb of Calabasas. The casting director gave me an address, but of course didn’t inform me whose house I was headed toward. The gated community featured yellow hillsides of parched grass and a collection of huge, very fancy residences.
It was a neighborhood I had no business being in, but I felt not too out of place because I was driving a BMW 6 Series. Maks had challenged me to buy it.
“I don’t need anything like that, bro,” I told him, as we scoped out the awesome vehicle online.
“Don’t be such a little bitch,” he said. “You’ve got the money now, go ahead and get something of value. You’d rather be hauling your ass around in an economy compact?”
In the back of my mind, the answer was a resounding yes, but I caved in anyway. I have to say I didn’t get much more pleasure from driving a luxury vehicle than I did from the clunker Hondas and Fords that I had owned in the past. The car mania of California, where it was really important to people what car you drove, was totally lost on me.
I passed Kim Kardashian’s house, one of them, anyway, Dr. Dre’s place, then a series of monster real-deal mansions that looked like fortresses. At the very top of one of the hills was the fanciest house in the community, just a beautiful, beautiful home.
But I was only the help come to call, so I wasn’t ushered into the main house. Instead, I was directed to one of the two guesthouses on the property, which were large residences on their own terms. There I met Tamar Braxton, the singer, TV personality, actress—a one-woman force of nature, vibrant, loud, and dynamic. She was the kind of person who becomes your friend as soon as you shake her hand.
We hit it off immediately, starting a comfortable, back-and-forth banter that stuck with us the whole time we were together. She called me “Pal.” Maybe she misheard my name. She repeated personal catchphrases such as, “You tried it! You tried it!” She quickly realized that I wasn’t the ballroom-dancing white boy she had expected. She found out that I had more soul and more hip-hop in me than her little privileged ass had ever experienced on the planet. But she’s still fucking Tamar Braxton, she’s still the youngest sibling of the fabulous Braxton family, and that’s where she had it all over me.
She was also stretched way too thin. I kept a mental tab as we spoke, and I counted five gigs she was juggling in addition to Dancing with the Stars: hosting a Fox network talk show called The Real; starring in a reality show about her personal life, Tamar & Vince; promoting a new album, Calling All Lovers; releasing another album, of Christmas-themed songs, that she was doing with her sisters, Toni, Traci, Trina, and Towanda; plus random singles, music videos, and guest
appearances. I felt dizzy trying to keep track of it all.
She’d been on the show-business map a long time, and I don’t think she’d ever been broke. But she met her match in me and we had the best time that season. Odd couple that we were, on some deep-down level we were identical twins. She had a lot of potential, a lot of talent, a lot of sass, and she was a star, which meant she could carry off pretty much any performance and make it look effortless. Every time we got together she gave me everything she had.
Unfortunately, there were times when she just didn’t have anything left to give. Our schedule was insane even by early twenty-first-century standards, when multitasking turned crazy. She was promoting singles from her new album, and I was always flying all over the country to meet her at this venue or that. The rehearsal process was difficult for her, and we never had enough time. We had to catch dance sessions when we could, in hotel lobbies, on hallway carpets (like dancing in mud when compared to parquet), or green rooms of concert halls. In the course of working with her I became a professional lobby rehearser.
In a car, a warning light tells you that you need gas. You ignore it and the gauge falls down to empty, but you still ignore it and ride on fumes for another ten miles. Sooner or later, though, there’s going to be nothing left in the tank. Tamar’s low-gas warning light had been on for a long time.
During our Dancing with the Stars appearances, we had a series of great moments. The highlight of the season came in week six, when we scored a perfect 30 on a Janet Jackson routine centered around the album Rhythm Nation. Since Janet was Tamar’s idol in a lot of ways, the tribute had a deeply personal meaning for her.
Tamar was definitely one of the more vocal contestants on the show. I was able to handle it, but I’m not sure the audience could. A lot of times, people react to strong characters with their strong, outspoken comments, especially on social media.
We made the quarterfinals on the show, then flew to Vegas, where Tamar had a concert. Next she went to Atlanta, and I met her there. She was clearly exhausted when we headed to the set the following Monday and taped from six in the morning until eleven that night. We finished our dance early at the dress rehearsal, and I could see she was about to pass out. Her eyes were just swimming around in her head like marbles.
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