“So?”
After providing the five-minute version of my story, I listened as the more compassionate officer said, “I’m sorry, but you’re a vagrant and a minor and so you’ll have to come with us to the station.” It didn’t even help when I told them that if I wasn’t in class in the morning, it could jeopardize my scholarship. “Sorry.”
They granted me my request to make a phone call. When my neighbor upstairs, Laurie Weir, picked up the phone, she immediately flew downstairs and came with me to the station.
Sitting in the back of a black-and-white was a huge wake-up call. As I looked at all the homeless people and the prostitutes, many of them so young, I thought how cold they must be. I was so close to being on the street. Something in me shifted, rose up. Emancipation was less than five months away and I had better get some kind of game plan together. I had worked too hard and had come too far to be classified as a vagrant and thrown into juvenile detention.
At the station, the officers, now more informed about my status than before, understood that I was a ward of the State of Maine; they also took into consideration that I had crossed four state lines to study ballet. Apparently not in the mood for bad publicity or the mound of inevitable paperwork that they would have to do with social services, they came up with a perfectly acceptable offer. If I could prove that I had a secure place to stay, I would be released.
Survival wheels turned in me like they never had before. Laurie Weir called her older sister who lived in Greenwich Village and the plan was set in motion. The officers confirmed the arrangement and gave me a ride. Of course, I was always grateful to Laurie’s sister, a perfect stranger, who on the spot made a decision that made all the difference in my life and to the two New York police officers who decided to let me go.
It occurred to me later that this happens every day. Children frightened beyond their own comprehension make rash decisions based on confusion and fear, not facing the crisis head-on but running from it, perhaps because no one ever told them that confronting problems was an option.
I stayed for two weeks at the whimsical Greenwich Village apartment, regrouping, bringing my new social worker, Patrick Moynihan, up to speed, and getting my life together. I moved on again, this time staying in a series of seedy hotel rooms before landing a room at the Hotel Barbizon for Women on the East Side. Lauren Turner became my roommate there. She had determined to make her mark in Manhattan by entering into a Miss Black America pageant. To help pay the rent she worked for Eastern Airlines at LaGuardia Airport. God, please let her win, I kept praying. It was apparent to both of us that the tides were changing. The geeky girl from Maine was making her way in the big city. It would take Lauren some getting used to.
In early 1977 I auditioned to be, and booked my first tour as, a professional member of ABT’s second company. I was over the moon. The two-week tour was salaried, with a per diem on the road, rehearsal and performance shoes, and a stipend. No one at ABT had any idea about my near homeless straits and surviving on iron-grilled cheese sandwiches, right in the middle of the good life: Bloomingdales, Madison Avenue, attentive lines of chauffeur-driven town cars. Pedigreed pooches out for a spin with their hired dog walkers. Nannies pushing elegant baby prams.
The challenges kept on coming. I could rarely convince any establishment to accept the timetable of the welfare checks, and when I was unable to make my rent at the Barbizon Hotel, the keyhole was rudely plugged. I decided to supplement my stipend from the State of Maine with a part-time job. Going yet one more rung down on the rent ladder, Lauren and I moved into another seedy hotel on Broadway.
We rented a room with an elderly European couple. Both with cases of agoraphobia and other Howard Hughes-esque obsessive-compulsive habits. We didn’t stay long.
At my wit’s end one afternoon as I walked up and down the streets of the Upper West Side, I was drawn to a soulful building on Seventy-first Street. No doorman, simple, nondescript. Rich with some kind of history, I was sure, though I couldn’t tell much—in spite of the fact that there were no blinds on the windows. I rang the manager’s bell.
“I’m here to see the apartment for rent,” I said into the intercom. Positive thinking.
“We’re not advertising,” replied a woman’s voice. “How did you know?”
Impressed when I told her that it was because the blinds weren’t hung, the manager/owner’s sister invited me in and showed me around the small available space that seemed like a luxury palace after where I had been. We had a brief conversation and she offered me the unit. Then came the hitch—I was underage. Quickly, I proposed that my roommate, Lauren, who was eighteen, would sign for me.
I managed to furnish my first real apartment in New York City with orphaned items left on the street and in Dumpsters. New York then and later had the best thrown-away treasure I had ever seen. This was part of my education in the development of a very strong sense of irony. I fell in love with irony, the most potent coping skill for keeping a smile on my face no matter what happened inside or around me.
Ironically, it turned out the building I was inhabiting was owned by author James Baldwin, whose importance as one of America’s greatest living black writers I wouldn’t really know until later. Whenever we met, he was phenomenally gentle. His eyes regularly looked like they were crying, for reasons I did not know how to ask him about.
Another irony was that even though I was strapped, pinching every penny and living from check to check, still a dependent of the State of Maine’s DHHS, dreading the date of May 10, 1977, with every encroaching week, before the weather started to warm up I learned that I had landed print work with Seventeen magazine and would be working with photographers Bruce Weber and Patrick Demarchelier, and possibly traveling to dreamed-about locations. Things were looking up.
All of this was happening at the same time that my new social worker, Patrick Moynihan, another dedicated advocate, wrote to remind me to sign paperwork as I was turning eighteen in May. As if I needed any reminders.
The professional opportunities that were starting to arrive were encouraging. They were also more reasons to keep myself on a strict diet.
From an early age, food and eating were chaotic for me, not originally connected to body image. Whatever my core being was trying to accept, I believe that in the confusion of losing two mothers before the age of three, one thing was certain—there was a communion between loss and physical hunger. Over the years, I would not eat in order to feel, or eat not to feel. It wouldn’t be until well into my adulthood that I could learn how to feed myself for the first time without guilt or shame.
At Forest Edge, Agatha, amazing cook that she was, never understood why I ate like a bird—long before I had begun to dance. I recalled images, sitting alone at the red Formica kitchen table staring at a plate of cold food. Bacon had to have every vestige of fat removed, which I did via a dissection process using scientific precision. Documented well by my social workers and doctors, I refused to eat what I didn’t like. I controlled that part of my life.
Fortunately, I loved food from the earth. Raw everything. I loved Agatha’s winter shakes—made from evaporated milk, an egg, and vanilla extract poured over fresh-fallen snow—to keep weight on.
Once I outgrew those earlier, finicky habits, eating wasn’t a problem until I made the decision to compete in the major leagues of ballet. That summer program had opened my eyes to the idealized aesthetic that the top dancers had to represent, and in preparation for the ABT auditions, I had dieted all year long, telling myself that I was supporting Robyn, but really gaining a sense of my own food and body control by taking in a very minimal eight hundred calories a day.
Upon arrival at ABT—weighing a proud 105 pounds on my fairly tall frame—I was promptly informed that I’d have to lose more weight. That I was heavy. As much as I had riding on my scholarship, I didn’t want to seem insubordinate, but how could I eat less than nothing?
Ironically, I noticed that some of the other scholarship dancers
ate much more than I did and had no weight to lose. In their perfectly pulled-up buns, not a hair out of place, they were so lavishly carefree in the way they bought boxes of pastries and ate several in one sitting. How was that possible?
No answers were forthcoming until one night in the dorm when I heard the most thunderous growl coming from the communal bathroom down the hall. I leaned my head out my door but saw no one.
The next day at lunch, the bun heads were at it again. Loading up their plates with pastries, ice cream, soda, chocolate syrup, and nuts. You name it. Needing to know, I asked directly, “How are you consuming all this food and losing weight at the same time?”
The three dancers, holding their overladen trays in front of them, their oversized heads disproportionate to their bodies, alien even, stopped dead in their tracks, looked at me in disbelief, and moved on.
I was dead serious. What was their secret? Somebody had better tell me.
Finally one of them said, “I’ll show you.” With that she led me upstairs and we proceeded down the hall into a lavatory. Then she showed me, plunging her fingers down her throat. “That’s how,” she said, matter-of-factly, demonstration over.
I stared at her in simultaneous disgust and amazement.
“It’s the only way. Besides, you can eat whatever you want.”
The next morning I gave it a try. Hideous though it was, I felt that I’d been initiated into the clandestine club and didn’t always have to starve myself thin in those instances when, like them, I could eat what I wanted and not gain weight. From that moment on, we neither discussed nor admitted to its practices.
There was nothing ironic to me when it was made clear that at ninety-five pounds, I was still classified as not thin enough.
Not until years later did I permanently break through the impossible beauty images imposed on me. With trepidation, I sought help with this and found a support group of courageous spiritual women in a St. Louis suburb. I was shown how to feed myself, one mouthful at a time—and I would finally emerge from the long night of deprivation, weak at first, but eventually able to nurture and take responsibility for myself in a healthy way.
But back during my late teens and twenties, these patterns contributed a mighty sword of Damocles that hung over me, tempering the pride I ought to have enjoyed from numerous successes.
Tangled up in all this were the physical symptoms of the excessive, uncontrollable perspiration of my hands and feet. To my credit, it was in these years that I began to research the condition by finding what scientific information was available. Eventually I learned that my malady had a name: hyperhidrosis. Its causes were genetic, an anomaly according to medical doctrine, and in no way connected to physical activity. Some believed hyperhidrosis was caused by an overactive sympathy gland. Hence, to correct it would require a sympathectomy.
My version of hyperhidrosis—palmar and plantar (of the hands and feet) was one of the more common variations. I learned that most cases, like mine, began in childhood or early adolescence and, to my great dismay, not only would persist throughout one’s life but might become worse. I read of cases that resulted in extreme limitation of professional options. It amazed me that I had coped as well as I had, avoiding contact, devising ways to take my tests at school by keeping an extra piece of paper under my writing hand.
Dr. George Lipkin of New York University Medical gave me my first glimmer of hope for recovery in my twenties. For the first time I could begin assorted treatments and have a conversation with someone about the isolation.
He reminded me of Mr. Rogers on TV and shared in a warm, but matter-of-fact kind of way different scenarios worse than mine, which helped me get perspective as I rowed a rudderless boat. Dr. Lipkin told me that there were those who were unemployable, a nun who wanted so badly to touch, those whose affliction was so great that they became totally reclusive, and some, I fear, who took their own lives out of sheer shame and loneliness.
Paralyzed by the disorder, one man gave up his political career not because he couldn’t get the votes but because he would lose due to a questionable handshake. Hands told a story; they mattered in this world and no one knew that more than I did. I didn’t want to fall out of the race.
Few methods of treatment existed. Medications had either proven not effective or had caused such other symptoms as muscular paralysis. Surgeries to date were either so drastic as to require the removal of sweat glands or were in the experimental stages. The only glimmer of hope to be found was the use of a complicated, expensive contraption that involved the application of low-level electrical current to one’s extremities while submerging them in an electrolyte solution—a process that had met with mixed reports; some said that it significantly reduced symptoms while others reported the opposite. Riding on that glimmer, I determined to set aside every cent that I could to be able afford the machinery as soon as possible.
In the meantime, I scoured the yellow pages, and found a chiropractor who advertised that he could cure my malady. He turned out to be a quack, and shortly thereafter, I read in the Village Voice that he had been arrested.
It would be a long process to understand why the shame of hyperhidrosis drove me to self-medicate. Hard as it was, I chose life and pushed on, secretly reading self-help books and magazines and showing up for dreaded appointments. I thought if I could only fix this one problem, everything else would be perfect. But there’s never just one thing.
Over time I had to accept that I had to do all of the work and there were no shortcuts. The work was crushing and painful—and I wanted to quit, and I did quit, and then I’d begin again, with the intercession of certain guardians, one of whom was one of my oldest and most trusted friends and fosterers, Margie Cortez, who wrote me words I could remember on the tough days:
When you are ready to talk, I’ll listen—until then, you are in my thoughts and prayers—I love you because of who you really are, not because of or due to any circumstances that have happened in your life; all trials and blessings have a greater purpose—follow your heart Vic.
For seventeen years, I took to wearing gloves to hide the potential of symptoms erupting without warning in social settings, cultivating something of a fashion statement with my glove collection that was in keeping with my other penchant for vintage clothes and hats. In the dance and theater worlds, no one seemed to think anything other than that perhaps I was quaintly old-fashioned and ladylike. A grande dame in training.
On the last day of my legal unemancipated youth, I resolved to move out at my earliest chance, allowing Lauren to keep the apartment. I was a fighter, but I was learning to pick my battles.
That night I sat in my bedroom, painted the same royal blue as our dinner table at Forest Edge, on the renovated mattress that I had months before dragged in from the cold, with the open window allowing in cool spring air and the sounds of giggling girls on the street mixed with New York City traffic, as I watched the digital clock given to me by the practical Mr. Silverman. Those unrelenting, uncaring red neon numbers flickered by. Tears streamed down my face.
Midnight struck. I was eighteen. Eighteen. Legal. Emancipated. Old. Too old to be the daughter of the State of Maine under the financial care of the Department of Health and Human Services. Too old for my late though steady checks, or for supervision by my social worker, or for the subsidy of my ballet scholarship. Maybe too old for Seventeen magazine after all. Too old for foster parents. An adoption. Just plain old at eighteen.
On February 5, a Tuesday, the blizzard of 1978 bullied its way into Manhattan like Raymond Armstead going ninety miles an hour up Route 95 North.
What began as a nor’easter in New England, creating unprecedented carnage in the wake of its hurricane strength winds at seventy-nine miles per hour, had blanketed New York City in twenty-seven inches of snow in twenty-four hours, making it the worst winter in 105 years. Snowdrifts crested the tops of parked cars—which I observed from my window after being awakened by my alarm clock’s chirping. Mainer that I wa
s, it never occurred to me that class at ABT that day might not be held as usual and on time.
After all, it was only snow, I reminded myself as I bundled up, grabbed my ballet bag, and headed out. Besides, there was talk that I was in contention for my first film role—dancing, of course, in the corps de ballet in the upcoming movie version of Hair. Weather was definitely not going to stand in my way of being in the right place at the right time, wherever and whenever the opportunities were going to come.
A wave of familiarity met me outside on the street as I set off on foot for the studio at Columbus Circle. It was so reminiscent of Forest Edge after a major snowstorm, except that this was New York City. All sense of hustle and bustle had been slowed, to create a cityscape that was uniquely quiet. No traffic. No hurries to get anywhere because there weren’t many places to go. There were sights rarely seen—grown men in the street revisiting their long-forgotten youth by throwing snowballs like happy children, cross-country skiers skittering along the snow-laden sidewalks, the regular walkers out on sleds, even one of the ubiquitous NYC joggers in snowshoes. We greeted one another like members of a select club, applauding each other’s respective decision to get up and go someplace in the face of what appeared to otherwise be a city snowed to a standstill.
Standing still wasn’t an option for me. Not for a second would I have ever taken for granted the station to which I had risen, now as one of twenty carefully selected dancers, getting ready to tour in the fall with the second company, being groomed to compete for the next tier—the main company. Only a handful would make the grade. Out of that group of six or seven, the likelihood was that only one or two might eventually be crowned as a prima ballerina. Already I had seen hopes dim for several who started out with me almost two years earlier, while witnessing the elevation of others who had always stood out.
The Women Who Raised Me Page 22