‘‘I’ve never been onstage,” I said, laughing nervously between every phrase. “I can’t fill in for three people.” I thought I saw Erica smirk about my size when I said that. Sometimes I needed to behave more like August Valentine and I just couldn’t. Fear yanked on my nerves, like somebody pulling the emergency cord on a speeding train.
Rex stood up, his chair making a scraping sound on the floor. He wrapped one leg around the other and bent his torso to stretch his hamstring. Although he wasn’t facing me when he bent over, he continued the conversation. The rest of us-Erica, Spitz, Isla, Helene, and I were the only ones left-watched him intently.
“I really can’t budge on this, August. If we’re going to open in two weeks, there simply isn’t time to train anyone else. We’ll modify the choreography to accommodate your body type, but you’re going to have to do it. You can’t let me down.” Jumping into August’s skin, I bit the bullet.
Over the next two weeks leading up to the show, my stage fright didn’t worry me nearly as much as my fear of trying to be a dancer, since I disliked my body so much. All the movements in the show were awfully complicated and specific. I had to learn exactly when to nod or stick out my elbows. I had to listen to the music and move my body along with changes we heard. I didn’t have the technical experience to learn the movements the way everybody else did. I felt like Hyacinth, the hippo from Fantasia who dances in a tutu.
Luckily for me, Rex was also interested in artists who used chance as a way to make their dances. He’d included some improvised parts in the show to demonstrate that. One of them was the dervish section. It happened at the climax of the piece, two thirds of the way into the two-hour show. When the dervish section started, Isla would toss her curly hair over her head as a signal. After the signal, the tight rules of the rest of the choreography would disappear for a while. The performers could follow our creative energies and take the spirit of the performance in whatever direction we chose.
The dervish section didn’t even have a set time period. In order to end it and go on to the next choreographed section, there had to be agreement among the dancers. To let everybody else know that you wanted to end the improvisation section, you would go upstage, to the back of the space. You would move your mouth angrily and point your finger with your arm stretched out. This was a movement made by a mentally damaged inmate in the film who gave long speeches about God that nobody could understand. Erica had to stand on her head and sing praise to the Lord at the same time. When everybody was mouthing and pointing upstage, the choreographed part of the dance would continue.
“In theory,” Rex explained, “this performance-within-the-performance could go on forever-maybe for the rest of your lives-unless you all agree to end it.” He laughed. “This is when the show becomes about the madness of society. The way in which real freedom in a society made of individuals becomes an asymptote, a ‘moving toward’ that never arrives at a pure expression of itself, whatever ‘self’ means.” To emphasize these difficult qualities, Rex said we should change our minds frequently about stopping the dervish section.
Just before the opening, Rex added an hour and sometimes two to the regular rehearsal times, and stopped giving us Fridays off. I prayed that Marco, the guy who owned the big warehouse where the show would run, would get a paying customer for the space so that we could have more time, but that didn’t happen.
Finally, on May 10, opening night came. I didn’t want to appear onstage. Secretly I hoped nobody would come, even though I had put a lot of cards out on tables in coffee shops and record stores and at Over the Rainbow. As nervous as I was about the audience, I feared Rex and his judgment even more. He was always kind, but some of the things he said could be devastating because they were true, and the truth always hurt more if someone said it in public. After one run, my only note from him was “Slower.” But more often he would sit in the stands during the runthroughs and notice with a sharp eye every small thing that I did wrong. But he never brought up that I might fail, and nobody had ever treated me so well.
The first night, Miquel came with Jane from Loco Motion. I asked them to sit in far chairs so that I wouldn’t get nervous. I needed to feel like nobody was watching me, or I would freeze up. Although I knew it wouldn’t make other people happy, I was thrilled that the house wasn’t full in the huge Atlanta Lumber space.
As a concept for the set, Rex spread out the seats in the warehouse. Each chair had a few feet of space around it. Rex said he wanted to “force a physical confrontation between the so-called sane individual and his mentally ill counterpart.” People who came to see The Titicut Project were immersed in the environment of the mental institution. Rex said it would “emphasize the isolation and stigma experienced by the insane.” Putting viewers in with the performers would also make them question their own sanity. I wondered if dancing could really do all that. In the end, I had to trust all the people who had studied in famous places.
We wore bodysuits that made us look naked, and white masks. I had a bodysuit close to the color of my skin but not quite dark enough. Isla, in her funny accent, said it made me look like my skin had been ripped off.
We moved around the raw space in ways that were sometimes graceful but mostly not. Some movements threatened the audience, but none of them hurt anybody. Even in the sunny light of the upstairs rehearsal space, I worried that The Titicut Project would scare folks. From the depressing nature of the movie, I should have known. But when we moved it into the musty warehouse and played all the creepy music, I felt in my heart that The Titicut Project really did tempt Satan. That might explain what happened that night.
See, I had a lot of nervous tension before the curtain went up. When I get real crazy nervous I belch a whole lot, so I tried to do it quietly, away from others. I also used some breathing techniques for reducing stage fright that Alexandra Spitileri, the dancer we called “Spitz,” had taught me. During the first few minutes of the show, I nearly passed out from nervousness. But as I watched other people dance to help me remember the steps, I had less time to concentrate on the fact that people were watching me and that Rex was judging me. So I got through the difficult part. The strict choreography kept me waiting eagerly for the dervish section, when I could see what it felt like to really let loose.
By the time we hit the three-quarter mark, I had become more comfortable doing the movements. The mask worked like Rex had said it would: it gave me a feeling that I could do anything I wanted, with no consequences and without anyone watching. Unlike most of the rehearsals, we didn’t stop and start the dance-we had to go through the entire thing, like the first few moments of a roller-coaster ride after the highest drop. I couldn’t keep my eyes off Isla, who had a solo during which she used her graceful neck to approximate a patient who had a twitch that made him nod and shake his head. At the end of that section, she tossed her head forward and the dervish section started.
A storm of excitement broke in my head. Crazy drumming from Burma started on a tape. Suddenly, adrenaline washed through my body as I spun around the space. I got dizzy, and for a moment I forgot my clumsy, bulky body. Aping stuff I had seen in the film, I stomped on a part of the floor that made a drum sound with my bare feet. I did many jumping jacks. I pretended that somebody was bringing me downstairs to feed me through a tube in my nose. I lay down on the floor and flopped like a fish. I imagined that somebody had cut my face while shaving me. Another movement from the film I did was to bend my arms and wave them in front of me like somebody doing the dog paddle.
Soon Erica and Helene stood upstage, making silent speeches and pointing. The freedom door had opened inside me-but what a time for it to happen! I couldn’t stop myself from expressing the emotions that had been in my system for such a long time. I pushed away the seat behind me with my foot. Then I kicked all the empty chairs off to the side one by one, until I had formed a pile. Then I picked one up and beat it against the concrete, thinking of my father’s abuse, the nasty note, Annie and Cheryl�
�s innocence, my own shame and guilt, and somehow, worst of all, Hank! How I longed even now to run my fingers over the down at the nape of his neck! Lord, I could have screamed, What is so wrong with that?
I didn’t notice for a long time that Isla, Alexandra, Helene, and Erica had all moved upstage. But their agreement that I should stop only made me more upset. I knew that in silent pantomime theater we weren’t supposed to speak or make noises. But in that moment I forgot myself. In the film, a man goes into his cell, squats facing the wall, and screams. Just like him, I bent my knees and let out an unearthly yell like somebody possessed by the devil. Maybe this moment should go on for the rest of our lives, I said to myself.
But then in my vision, a skylight opened up in the warehouse just above me, and a light came down on me and touched me everywhere. It rolled over me like an electrical storm compressed to the size of one person, devastating every small town up and down the coast of my body. Like sheets of rain and hail pummeling me, purging all the bad emotions.
Finally exhausted after fifteen minutes, I fell down. I wasn’t sure what had happened. In church, I’d have known what that light was. But in a theater, it had to be something else. But what? Did one of the kliegs go out? Or did it have to be anything? Exhausted, I clambered up and took my place among the other dancers upstage. I shook as I moved my mouth and pointed with two fingers. The performance continued. At the end, the audience applauded politely and filed out. I thought we deserved more praise.
“Gosh,” Miquel said afterward, in the booth of a twenty-four-hour fifties diner with stars on the chairs. A stack of pancakes puffed in front of him. “You were really on tonight, Augie.” I told him about my vision of light and he nodded, but didn’t comment.
Most people hadn’t said anything about the performance. In fact, most people who showed up hadn’t even stayed long enough to see the dervish section. Rex had said congratulations to us backstage and given us all roses and cards, but he seemed none too happy about the way the show had gone.
Miquel peeled the wax paper off a pat of butter, scraped it off the cardboard with his knife, and slid it between the cakes. “Honest, I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
“Did you really like it?” I asked him, smiling. Then I remembered our earlier fight about how I couldn’t criticize dance pieces and thought maybe I shouldn’t have asked. I changed the guest ion around. “Do you think I could be a dancer?”
Miquel’s eyes slid from my face to his napkin. He grabbed his glass like a kid and took a sip of water. “It was really intense, the whole thing,” he kept on. ‘I’ll bet that’s why so many people left. They couldn’t stand it. The intensity. I’m going to have to rent the movie it’s based on. Jane had to go, by the way. She told her boyfriend she’d meet him at 9:30 before she knew how long the show was going to go. She said to say mazel tov and tell you how much she enjoyed it and how bad she felt about having to leave.”
Miquel had brought me a bouquet of carnations for opening night. They had been grown in food coloring, and the flowers had turned blue and green and purple. The bouquet rested on the far part of the table until the waiter brought my Belgian waffle with ice cream. I moved the flowers to an empty seat. From doing the show, my hands still had a nervous kind of lightness in them, and I breathed easily. I was acting a little drunk, even though I hadn’t had any alcohol.
Gazing at the carnations, I said, “I wish you had brought me those on a regular night,” as I poured syrup in a zigzag motion, filling the waffle’s squares.
Miquel cut a wedge of his pancake stack. He paused when I talked. Still holding the knife and fork up, he shot a pained glance at me, then sighed and put down the utensils. “Augie,” he said. After a few moments he picked up the knife and fork again, poked a chunk of sausage to go with the pancake, and stuck the food into his mouth. A song played on the radio that said “Turn, turn, turn,” with words I recognized from Ecclesiastes.
I knew he was about to bring up a relationship topic but I had to wait until he finished chewing. “I suppose there’s a lot we need to talk about,” he finally said as the song finished.
“Don’t break up with me, Frosty,” I blurted out.
“Jesus, you’re paranoid! What gave you the impression I was winding up to do that?”
“You shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! When I go to Hell I’ll be really surprised if it’s for taking the Lord’s fucking name in vain. Mierdakotexteta!” That word was his father’s way of trying to curse in Spanish.
“Miquel, I get so scared for you when you talk like that.” Soon after we moved in together, he had demanded that I stop trying to save him after I bought him a religious self-help book for his birthday. “Carho-Iick!” he said, waving the book in his hand. “Got it? I was raised Catholic, and I’m never going back there, let alone evangelical Christianity. I’m plenty crazy as it is.”
I held back from proselytizing now, but I couldn’t stop completely. I wanted the best for his eternal soul, plus I felt like Heaven wouldn’t really be Heaven without him. “I don’t want you to go to Hell.”
He touched my cheek jokingly. “You’re not fooling anyone with all that piety. Without Mr. Jesus, you’d be as big a whore as me. You’re gonna be my cellmate, Angelcake. It’ll be Kiss of the Spider Woman 2!”
“You’re drunk,” I said, leaning forward and whispering it to him like gossip.
“Good call. And Mars is the goddamned Red Planet, FYI.” He removed a new pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and banged them on the Formica, then ripped the red thread off with his teeth. Once he got one lit, he took an extra-long drag, leaned back, and exhaled like somebody expelling his ghost into the air above him. I watched for a while, a little disgusted, and then coughed. It was a real cough, but it sounded fake. I could tell from his expression that Miquel thought I was pretending, but I couldn’t help that.
“You s-” he began.
“I what?” He said nothing, but lowered his chin so that his pupils went halfway under his eyelids. That razor-sharp stare spooked me.
Miquel flagged down the waiter, a thin boy about eighteen years old. He had a strong jaw and eyebrows like charcoal marks under wavy gold hair. Neither of us could keep our eyes off him.
His smile was an ear of white corn. “What can I do for y’all?”
Slowly, one corner of Miquel’s mouth curled into a smirk. He turned to the boy, and if he’d done with his hands what he did with his eyes, he’d be in jail now. “What can you do for me? Geez, I don’t know where to start,” he purred.
I kicked him under the table and missed, jamming my toe against the chair. The waiter heard the noise, but only chuckled nervously and scratched his arm.
“Do you guys need a couple of minutes?”
“With you? Maybe a couple of hours.” This time my foot connected with Miquel’s shin and he yelped like a coyote in a snare.
“I’ll— I’ll just come back, okay?”
I took the opportunity to grab the waiter’s forearm. It was tan and covered with silky yellow hairs. I had been watching the vein in his biceps appear and disappear as he flexed his arm to lift his pad and pen. “Oh no,” I said. “He’s ready. Tell him what you want!” I twisted my face at Miquel and clenched my jaw. I held the warm arm until the boy deliberately stepped out of my reach.
Grumbling so low that the waiter had to ask him to repeat himself, Miquel ordered a Bud Dry. It arrived quickly, and he sucked at the bottle like a newborn chugging at Mama’s tit.
“So what should we do?” he asked into the empty bottle, making him sound like a lonely guy in a basement.
“Do about what?”
The waiter passed by and Miquel raised his hand to get his attention. “Another,” he said, pointing to the empty beer bottle.
“You’ve had enough,” I told him. There was still a swallow left in the bottle. I slid it toward me. Slyly, Miquel eyed the waiter’s rear end. “Why is it that homos
exuals can’t think about anything but sex?” I wondered aloud. I still thought of this time as a good transitional phase. When my year ended in a few months, I’d only want his companionship, and I’d enjoy straight, normal sex forever more. It made sense for the Lord to do things this way.
Miquel tapped an ash into his water glass. “Are you kidding? Can you imagine how ugly the world would be if homosexuals didn’t think about fashion and architecture more than they think about sex?” He swung his shoulders crudely, shifted in his seat, and pulled hard on his cigarette. Miquel knew I didn’t like it when he acted womanly, so he played it up. He pursed his lips and stroked the back of his neck as he rested the cigarette on the edge of his saucer. The waiter placed the beer in front of him and he followed the boy’s behind with his eyes again, this time in an obvious way, to mock me.
“See?” I gestured at the guy’s butt, like it somehow proved my point. “Why does sex have to be so important?” I growled. “Can’t we just cuddle?”
“Darling,” Miquel said, “I can cuddle with a cocker spaniel. With a human being, I want some ack-tion.” Miquel started to sing and make feminine dancing motions with his hands. “I want to live.’ Ack-tion, I got so much to give. I want to give it, I want to get some too!” Then he made some catlike noises, still singing. I wanted to slide under the table and die.
“Shut up, Miquel,” I snapped, with August’s gumption pulsing up my neck. People turned around. He pretended I hadn’t said anything. He continued to sing, even raising his voice a little. “Please, cut it out.”
He sang directly to my face. “I love the nightlife, I’ve got to boogie, on the disco round, oh yeah!” Dancing with his shoulders, he leaned across the table and stuck his lips out to provoke me. Furious, I stared at the knife on my plate and wondered what would happen if I stabbed him right then. Probably nothing, since it was a butter knife. In any case, I felt that Jesus didn’t want an attempted murder charge for me.
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