Every Step You Take

by Jock Soto

  As I explored my “living past” it made me feel guilty to realize how strained and painful my relationship with my father had been for so much of my life. Maybe Pop had been revisiting our problematic relationship too—maybe that’s what caused his strange outburst over the phone. I know some fighting is inevitable between fathers and sons, and in my case, my emerging homosexuality during adolescence definitely complicated the relationship with my macho pop. And of course, my resentment of my father’s infidelities as a husband did not help our relationship. As I look back, I can see that at no time were things tenser between us than in the months when I was first launching my new life as a full-time student at the SAB in New York.

  When I called my parents on that summer evening in 1979 with my exciting news, I’m sure I never, for one instant, paused to think about the havoc I might be causing for the rest of my family. I guess I was already floating through life in that bubble of selfishness that the teenage ego spins for itself, a self-contained and self-reflecting world in which my needs and my desires and my hopes and my fears were all that existed. It was the end of July when I made that call home, and by the end of August Mom and Pop and Kiko had all picked up and moved to New York. Kiko had been offered a role in a PBS television pilot that was being filmed in Boston, and I tried to convince myself that the East Coast seemed like the best option for all of us at the time. But increasingly, as I look back, I am struck by the sacrifices everyone in my family seems to have made for me when I was very young—and I feel some late-blooming guilt.

  My parents and Kiko and I settled into a small apartment in the Rego Park section of Queens, and poor Kiko was enrolled in some local high school (in a recent phone conversation he reminded me that he attended four different high schools over four years). My father and I began what would turn out to be our last session of daily commutes together—and our ugliest, both in terms of traffic and clashing personalities—driving back and forth from the apartment in Rego Park to my ballet classes at the Juilliard School in Manhattan.

  Fourteen is a notoriously unattractive age for all boys; still, I shudder when I think about the way I treated my parents during those months while we were living together in New York. I was attending ballet classes during the day, and hanging around Lincoln Center between classes and in the evenings as much as I could, sneaking into performances, soaking up anything and everything that I could about ballet. Many of my fellow students were enrolled in the Professional Children’s School, which allowed them to squeeze their academic studies in between the intense demands of classes at SAB, but we couldn’t afford the $3,000 tuition (it’s an astronomical $35,000 today). Instead, my parents enrolled me in correspondence courses for the eighth grade. I was completely uninterested in these courses, and I remember sitting at dinner one night and announcing to my mother and father that schoolwork was a waste of time and that I wasn’t going to bother with it anymore. They looked at each other and then at me, and began to try to argue that this really wasn’t a choice, that I had to keep up with my studies—but we all knew that I had taken the bit in my teeth and would do as I pleased.

  Another source of irritation between my parents and me in those days was the monthly stipend of $250 for living expenses that SAB gave me. The expectation was that I would turn this money over to my father as soon as I got it, and in retrospect I can see that this was completely reasonable—my entire family had moved to New York to allow me to pursue my ballet career. My parents were both working to support all of us here. But at the time the adolescent monster in me resented having to hand over what I considered to be my money. After a couple of months of seething at the unfairness of all this, I decided to try an experiment. When I received my next check for $250, I didn’t mention it to my parents but went to the bank and cashed the check myself. Giddy with my greenbacks, I went directly from the bank on a big spending spree, splurging on about forty dollars’ worth of candy. When I got home I stashed my candy (a mother lode of M&M’s Peanuts and Reese’s Pieces, as I recall) and my leftover cash in my underwear drawer. I felt triumphant—I was a cunning and clever Candy Lord. When my father asked me repeatedly during the next week if I had received my check yet, I just shrugged my shoulders and shook my head.

  Kiko and I were both getting to be pretty big boys by this time, and when either of us ran short of socks or underwear, we would, with the selfish self-sufficiency of teenagers, walk across the hall and raid our father’s dresser. It had never once occurred to me that when my father ran out of socks or underwear he might reverse the raid—but he did, and this was how I got caught in my lies about the check. Pop was furious when he found all that money stuffed away under my candy one morning, and the scene where he took back the money and confronted me was not pretty.

  On the drive to ballet school later that same morning, Pop and I didn’t speak. The car was a rolling rage cage. That night NYCB had a special gala to raise money for the school, and several kids, including me, had volunteered to sell raffle tickets before the show. As I got out of the car, I told Pop that he should come a half hour later than usual that evening, that I would be inside the New York State Theater doing the raffle thing, but then I would come find him and we would go home.

  Principal dancers Sean Lavery and Heather Watts were performing that night in Peter Martins’s Rossini Pas de Deux. I was dying to watch my idols work their magic, and after the raffle sale was over, although I knew I should go find my father and head home, I allowed myself just one peek inside the theater. Of course I ended up staying for the entire program—there was no way I could leave.

  When the performance was finally over I ambled out into the dark Manhattan night, dizzy with excitement and emotion from what I had just seen—and there was my father, waiting for me in the white van he had leased when he and Mom moved to New York. When I got into the car there was dead silence, and we drove over the Queensboro Bridge and all the way home without saying a word. It was not until we were back in the apartment that he followed me into my bedroom and spun me around to face him and began shouting at me: “Why did you make me wait for three and a half hours? What were you doing in there?” I looked at him and shrugged. “I wanted to see the performance,” I answered, as if this should have been perfectly obvious to anyone. And then we both exploded. He shoved me onto my bed and started yelling at me and I began to scream hysterically, “That was my money, that was my money! And I wanted to see the ballet!”

  The incident marked a turning point for Pop and me. We stopped speaking to each other and coexisted with a wall of resentment between us. When he drove me to ballet school, I would just stare out the window, dying for the moment when I could get out of the car and away from him. I’m sure the commute was equally unpleasant for him. It was a miserable situation—so miserable that not much later I came up with what I thought was a brilliant solution for all of us. Mom and Pop and Kiko and I were all standing on the little balcony overlooking the street at our Queens apartment when I decided to share my idea.

  “Guess what! I’ve decided to move out!” I announced with a happy smile. There was dead silence, followed immediately by a horrendous crashing explosion from somewhere below us on the street. My parents looked at each other and then we all looked over the railing to see what had happened. A car that had come racing around the corner had just smashed into my father’s white van.

  “That’s it!” my father screamed. “I hate it here! We’re getting the fuck out!”

  Pop meant what he said, and he did what he meant. Within days he and Mom and Kiko had packed up and moved out of our apartment in Queens. I know that leaving me alone in New York must have been difficult for my mother—she said as much many times in later years. But she too had tired of the hardships of the city, and her instincts as a dutiful wife told her she should stick with my father. I remember Mom and Pop and Kiko all drove me to my ballet classes on the morning of the day they were leaving. I stood outside the Juilliard School and waved good-bye. I was fourteen, and totally
on my own in New York City. I had $250 a month to live on and no place to live yet, but I had launched my ballet dream. I was in heaven.

  My introduction to the glamorous life in the big city began not long after my parents’ departure with a classic New York experience: eviction. My fellow SAB student Jefferson Baum and I considered ourselves complete geniuses when we landed a cheap place to live in the upper nineties—but only a few days after moving in we found ourselves back on the street. Evidently we had a sublet of a sublet. Discouraged and with nowhere to go, we threw ourselves at the mercy of two fellow dancers, Einar Thordarson and Afshin Mofid, who had rented an apartment on the top floor of a Sixty-ninth Street brownstone. We begged them to let us squat with them for just a few days while we figured things out, and as we were all in that “the more the merrier” stage of life, of course they said yes. Somehow a few days bled into a few more days, and a short visit became a technically illegal overoccupancy. I remember one day all four of us boys were practicing our double air tours over and over in the apartment, when suddenly there was a knock on our door. When we opened it, there stood the owner and landlord—Edward Villella. The man whose gravity-defying leaps had first impassioned me for ballet when I was only four years old was their landlord, and he lived downstairs. Apparently his chandelier had been swinging back and forth so wildly as a result of our double air tours he was afraid it was going to fall. He asked us to please stop—and then he took a second, more studied look at Jefferson and me. We were busted.

  Afshin and Einar immediately jumped to our defense, explaining that we had nowhere else to live, and begged him to let us stay. After a long silence, Mr. Villella gave us another long look—and nodded. Jefferson and I could stay, provided we each paid $175 a month in extra rent. We didn’t have a dedicated bedroom—Jefferson and I just set up our beds in the living room—but we had a home. We were thrilled.

  My tenure in Mr. Villella’s house was the beginning of a long and happy period for me. My roommates and I danced and trained together at SAB all day every day, and generally took care of one another in our life outside the school. After paying my rent I had only $75 left every month to buy groceries and eat, but my teenage roommates seemed to be in more or less the same spot, and we all worked together to keep one another going. I was probably the most experienced cook in the group—Kiko and I had run a fried-dough concession as boys, after all, and we had often cooked ourselves simple meals when we were home alone after school, waiting for our parents to get back from work. Whenever my SAB roommates and I went grocery shopping we would buy things like Hamburger Helper and ground meat, canned vegetables, pasta, and bottled Ragu sauce. Tuna casserole with Ruffles crumbled on top was a particular house favorite. Humble as these dishes may sound, a few simple tricks made them pretty delicious, and because they were easy to make in bulk no one had to hold back on seconds and thirds.

  Our apartment had a little terrace with a hibachi grill, and in good weather we would barbecue a megaload of hot dogs and invite some friends over to dine alfresco. I will never forget the chilly December night when John Lennon was shot outside his home at the Dakota, just a few blocks away. We joined the rest of the neighborhood in an all-night vigil in his honor. After making an enormous vat of mac ’n’ cheese to feed any visiting mourners, we placed our speakers in our front windows overlooking the street and blasted Lennon’s beautiful song “Imagine” into the cold night air.

  When I think back to this period I am surprised by how seamlessly I dropped out of any semblance of a family life into a completely unchaperoned life with a pack of boys. I remember no loneliness, no fear. I was a dance addict, and I was so thrilled to be in Balanchine’s school and living in New York that nothing else mattered. I was in the advanced men’s class at the school and one of our teachers, Stanley Williams, was so renowned that many of the big ballet stars in the company—male and female—would come and take class with us. I would stare in awe whenever dancers like Peter Martins, Robert Weiss, Helgi Tomasson, Ib Andersen, and Joseph Duell joined us—I found it difficult to concentrate. And of course I nearly fainted the first time Rudolf Nureyev walked in—sometimes he would come straight from the airport, having flown over on a Concord specifically to take Stanley’s class. The dressing room would always empty in a hurry whenever Rudy arrived, for he had quite a foul mouth and a creative and seemingly endless supply of lewd comments. He never changed himself but had an attendant who put his dance clothes on for him. I watched this exotic behavior with wide eyes, knowing that the moment Rudy stepped into the studio nothing in the world would matter except his dancing.

  All of my teachers at the school—Stanley Williams, Andrei Kramarevsky, and Richard Rapp—were completely dedicated to the job of instilling the art of classical ballet into our young bodies, but in the process they were also instilling important behavioral lessons about respect and hard work and deportment in general. Classes required 100 percent of one’s attention and 100 percent of one’s effort 100 percent of the time—period. To fidget or yawn was a misdemeanor, punishable by expulsion from class. Stanley Williams was particularly fascinating to me. He was very gentle and quiet—in fact, he rarely spoke—but very clear and precise in his actions. I would watch him carefully in class every day, trying to mimic his movements as precisely as possible, and I could actually feel myself learning to dance. It was thrilling.

  Of course whenever Balanchine came to watch class a buzz ran through the whole school. He would always stop by the office first to check in with Natasha Gleboff, so the word would get out that he was in the vicinity. Then he would do a walk-in, appearing in the classroom unannounced, and stand there, watching our combinations. He was always impeccably dressed in a well-fitted jacket and knit pants and beautiful shoes, a scarf at his neck and his hair slicked back—to me he looked like a movie star. Stanley would always go over and say hello to Mr. B, while the rest of us just held our breath and stood still as statues. On a few occasions Lincoln Kirstein came in with Balanchine, and then the excitement level was over the top. These two men represented what all of us were living for—they were walking icons, the original founders of the meaning of life as we knew it.

  The talent among the students at SAB was always very impressive to me, and in the spring of my first year there was great excitement when my former California classmate Darci Kistler attained the Holy Grail—Balanchine asked her to join the New York City Ballet. Typically only about 10 percent of the students attending SAB were invited to join Balanchine’s company, and to be picked at the young age of sixteen was also unusual. Later that year, after Darci had joined the company, I snuck into the theater to watch her perform George Balanchine’s Symphony in C. (A fellow student who delivered the flowers at the end of the performances used to leave an exit door cracked open; I would sneak in and sit in the fifth ring and then, taking note of which seats were empty, gradually work my way down toward the front between ballets.) I had heard about Darci’s performance in this ballet, and particularly about the second-movement pas de deux, but I was unprepared for what I was about to witness. When the music started and Darci started dancing, I was carried off to a dreamworld inhabited by a stunning angel in white. The whole theater gasped with me, and when the pas de deux was over—despite the NYCB de-emphasis on “stars” and overdrawn applause—the audience exploded. They would not let Darci leave the stage, but called her back again and again with endless rounds of applause. It was entirely inadvertent on Darci’s part, but she had simply stopped the ballet. It was an amazing moment, and I couldn’t believe my good fortune to be there to witness it. I couldn’t have imagined then that I would one day partner her in that same movement.

  Little by little I was having some tiny triumphs of my own that first year, and when the time came for the SAB Workshop Performances at the end of the year, I landed some nice roles. Stanley Williams chose my schoolmate Dagoberto Nieves and me to perform August Bournonville’s Jockey Dance and two Bournonville solos from Napoli; Joseph Duell, a princip
al dancer who was debuting as a choreographer, cast me and my fellow student Joseph Malbrough as the leads in his new ballet Jubilee. We would rehearse after our normal school day, usually from seven to nine at night, and I remember developing an enormous crush on Duell in these sessions.

  It seems so obvious to me now why I might have become infatuated with Duell, or why I sometimes found it hard to concentrate when the male ballet stars decided to join us in class. (I find it hard to believe, but sometime after my retirement Peter Martins told me that those big stars I was staring at in Stanley’s class were also staring back at me, flabbergasted that a fifteen-year-old boy was executing dance moves they had been working years to master. Peter tends to flatter me.) Back then, as a fifteen-year-old import from the Arizona desert, I was still puzzled by my own sexuality, and innocent about sex in general. The school and the company were both hotbeds of sexually charged adolescents and young adults, and I was well aware of all the clasping and grasping and flirting and pining and sighing and yearning in play around me. But I didn’t think about my own role in this exchange too specifically. Weren’t dancers supposed to be both passionate and physically expressive? And weren’t we all dancers?