by Andrew Binks
I wanted to skip all the way home at the prospect of having some cash come in, and also because she had been so damn nice. When I got home, I called Kent to see if he could lend me twenty dollars, but not before telling him my good news, so he would know he’d get paid back.
“You can have it if you let me blow you. Why do you need twenty dollars?”
“For the weekend.”
“The whole weekend? You can survive a weekend on twenty dollars?”
“I’m thrifty.” The hole in the wall at the end of the street sold pints to locals for two dollars, and I was rich—I had a jar of pickles and some spaghetti to last me for the weekend.
“Sounds like someone needs taking care of. Let me buy you a beer or two.”
And from that moment on, Kent called me every day. Funny how comforting that ringing phone became.
My job follow-up was limited to later that moody Monday, after Madame had a run at us, leaving our spirits even less intact than our bodies. Her bad mood reflected an especially pissed off state, which I figured was because of my good mood at demonstrating some grain of independence and successfully finding a home I referred to as spectaculaire, and my job prospects, and as a result out-dancing everyone that day.
I raced home with the single thought that the nightclub would work out. I called Marcel Missoni before I’d even dropped my dance bag, and he told me in perfect English, spiced with some kind of Franco-Italian accent, to come to the club that night. This request involved the hunt for bus fare. I mean, fucking bus fare. Pocket bottoms. Jacket liners. I cursed having spent all of Kent’s twenty. But I hit the jackpot: a fiver in some trashy cut-offs I wore two summers ago up on Lake Winnipeg, long before poverty had set in.
Which bus? On the phone Marcel couldn’t say because he’d never taken one. Who does? I wandered around the carrefour outside the city gates to find the bus to rue Lévesque, a sweaty ride in the back corner out to the Chez Moritz that busy September rush hour. An Indian summer had nosed its way in from New England for a moment. Could things get any better? Free transportation—Company buses, planes, trains, taxis and limos—was a thing of the past. This idea of me riding out to the suburbs of Quebec to work in a tits-and-feathers show would have disappointed anyone who had invested their hopes and efforts in my career, but fortunately there weren’t many. Not fair I suppose: Lisa, my first teacher, as well as my ex-roommates Peter and Rachelle, and the kind souls Bertrand and Louise, and others I have most likely and selfishly overlooked, played a role. Still, I was blindly optimistic.
Small-town Canada had been a family curse for several generations: Great Grampa Ramsbottom became Rottam. Dad showed them, and moved to a plusher place, got a college education, turned to dentistry—big money in big mouths. Big house. Only one kid, leading to suburban slanderous whispers of what a wife does alone; then years later what their son had being doing at a ballet studio. They tried their best: Dad with hockey, Mom with ballet and symphony. And I took my little opera glasses everywhere. At the hockey games, I watched the half-time figure skaters, while Dad and the men left their seats to drain their beer-bloated bladders in the common urinals and return with hot dogs.
Even at the ballet it was tough to conceal an appreciation of the human form. Timing with opera glasses was everything. My mom knew I loved the ballet but it was unheard of to have a son learn ballet. I would be the prisoner of a lumpy seat, an observer. She dreamed, too; when we weren’t at the ballet, my mother spent time in her sewing room, talking to my aunt on the phone while mending my socks and trousers, under that framed poster of Nureyev and Fonteyn on the wall above her, with classical music on a portable record player. “Swan Lake” crackled endlessly; “The Nutcracker” at Christmas—mostly things by Tchaikovsky and the Russians. When it was a ballet or a concerto, I fell asleep with patterns dancing in my head. My escape to university in another town brought freedom—and gave my parents the prestige they craved—but I surrounded myself with the familiar, the music mostly.
God. Family history flashing before my eyes on a desperate bus ride to the suburbs of Quebec by the only Rottam son (of the only Rottam son), who would most likely never carry on the family name. Shame does that. I stared at the backs of heads, wondered for a moment what was driving me forward, but knew the answer so well. By the time I got to rue Lévesque, the bus was almost empty and all I could see was the Chez Moritz standing out on the edge of the highway next to a motel, like the last remaining bulb in a dressing room mirror. That was it. No trees. No Dairy Queen. No Country Time donuts on Pembina Highway running south to the American border. No nothing. Just land ugly enough to be developed. The bus stopped midway along that nothingness. A stop made for the future inhabitants of dream homes.
The bus driver must have known why I got off there. I was reeking of lost soul. I risked being a statistic to walk the highway where there was no shoulder. The club probably had windows in a previous life. Maybe it had been a restaurant where people went for Sunday dinner. But now there were only frames surrounding boarded-up sections of wall with metal-screen grating nailed to that, all coated in matching flat brown paint—one nasty-looking compound. A neon sign spelled out the name, c-h-e-z m-o-r-i-t-z, letter by letter, with a cancan dancer whose one functioning pink leg flickered spastically from behind. I hauled open the door.
In the dark, I noticed the thick smell of beer and cigarettes first, then recognized the shape of that head of hair I’d seen in the paper. “Mister Missoni?”
He sat at the bar, looked over his shoulder. “Marcel, please, Marcel.” He was Louis XIV from a children’s book: very froofy, with glistening curly black locks, a near-handlebar moustache, great nose and chin. Handsome. He had a mouth that read slightly disgusted with everything. His small and slightly effeminate manner—like a tropical bird preening while clucking to himself—betrayed his masculine looks. He wore tight, black pants, and a vest over a dress shirt that made him look like a matador. Nothing seemed to be said or thought without a coif adjustment. He stirred a tall drink with a swizzle stick, his wrist bent at a ninety-degree angle. “You must be John. Have a seat.”
I sat on the stool beside him. He clicked his fingernails on the bar and the bartender quickly slid a beer in front of me. He must have seen my concern at not being able to pay, and winked. The bar extended from just beyond the front door and curved toward the back. Marcel sat closest to the door. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness behind him, silhouettes of bodies became women on small boxes dancing for slouching men at small tables. And soon I saw the bodies were naked—moving like wild animals on their stoops at the circus. I see them all now as I steady myself. I control this step by step to the bottom floor of no man’s land. I remember thinking it was like a kind of hell on earth, and here I am in this stairwell.
The naked bodies danced like they were in love with themselves. The agency never mentioned that part. Did they think I wouldn’t be interested? It wasn’t the chic nightclub of my fantasies. Still, bills had to be paid; I couldn’t ask for a twenty from Kent each time I needed to eat. I had rent to pay. In restaurants, booze prices carry the food losses. At the Chez Moritz I’d say the table dancers paid the bills, and the feathers-and-sequins burlesque passed things off as wholesome family entertainment. In the dark, men in the audience could have been dead for all I knew. But there was a stage against one wall where the legitimate spectacle, that I had come to be part of, happened. “We do three shows a night,” said Marcel, “at 10:30, midnight and 1:30.” He spoke perfect English with that hint of an accent. “You can come back tonight and see if you like it. Watch the show. Did you say you studied at the Conservatoire?”
“A little. Don’t hold it against me. I mean I can easily do this kind of…”
“Then we’re family. Best years of my life.”
“I was just there this summer. Before that…” I didn’t tell him before that. And I could tell he was one of those whose world only existed b
etween Quebec and Montreal. The country was full of them, whether it was knowing just Toronto or just Edmonton or just Vancouver, Sudbury, Fredericton, Wawa or Medicine Hat, and believing that your place was the centre of the universe. Besides I didn’t want him to know what I’d left, or how promising I once thought I was.
“And now?”
“I’ve always wanted to do the Vegas thing” (but I didn’t think the “Vegas thing” would happen so soon). Many retired ballet dancers had gone on to Vegas to dance or to choreograph or even run casinos, but they had already taken a few kicks at the ballet can (and it had kicked back). Had I sounded insincere?
“We have some good people. Talented.” He definitely sounded like he was exaggerating.
“Great.”
“Don’t you want to know how much we pay?”
“You’re making me an offer?”
“Come to my office for the paperwork.”
I followed him around the bar and down the back stairs. Girls coming up. Girls going down. A few of them nodded at him, touched his shoulder. No one noticed me. I got the feeling that drugs and booze were the big thrill on both levels, probably softening the rough edges, caked makeup, sweat and running mascara. As for me, I still had my days to get through, and since my body was my temple, I couldn’t afford much more than the odd beer. I would have to be fit to lead this double life.
He took me into an over-large makeshift bathroom—concrete floor, particleboard walls—with a grungy mothball shower. “I’m sure you can dance if you’ve been at the Conservatoire but I need to see your behind,” he said. “We wear g-strings. I make most of the costumes. Assless chaps, stuff like that. I just want to see your butt. Know how it will look—know your measurements.”
I figured it out.
Turn around.
Undo belt.
Drop pants.
Expose ass.
Wait for it. Whatever it might be.
“Dancer’s butt. Madame Talegdi find you?” he said.
“Yes.”
“I thought she might. She’s mad you know.”
“Crazy.”
“How are your thighs?”
“Stiff, tight. Too big.”
“They look great. Splits?”
“Both ways.”
He touched my behind, which felt good. But that was my problem. Then he reached around to my front. “Nice,” he said, gripping me. I exhaled. “This package will look fantastic in a g-string. I’ll need to make a generous pouch. You’ll do well here.” He let out an audible shiver.
“Was that my audition?”
“One of my guys just quit.”
“Right place at the right time?”
“Fifty bucks a night for the three shows. Plus tips.”
One week’s work would pay my rent. “Tips?”
“Bonuses. You don’t do drugs do you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. Well in that case you’ll make some money. Just be careful here. There’s always lots to walk in on. You don’t want to get under anybody’s skin. And watch your money, your tips.”
“I’m in?”
“You’re in. So come back tonight. See if it suits you.”
He was genuinely cute, with a twinkle in his eye; he was almost bashful, harmless and completely innocent. I remember that look—he looked up at me like we’d done something naughty.
Outside the Chez Moritz, the remains of the Indian summer clung to the end of the day, and a pale October sun turned the flat brown walls of the club orange. There was no going home for dinner and then coming back in the evening. I was confined to public transit and poverty. If I went home now, I would never return. I walked past an adjoining dump of a motel next door to the Chez Moritz and wondered who could stay in a dive like that.
As I walked I hummed that song. The one from the Disney movie. Something about how your dreams really do come true. Look at me: the poster child for following dreams. There I was following my dream, which had shrunk down to getting a coffee with extra cream at a truck stop out near a strip club that looked like an Armageddon bunker where the daily special was abuse and torture. I ended up about a mile down the road at a diner and spent two hours in a booth with a jukebox (which was useless without an extra quarter), stretching out a free refill of coffee and dreaming about the sugar pie in the display case. Dancers’ naive conversations about the difference between a fat calorie and a carbohydrate were a thing of the past.
Things had to get better. Did the truckers at the counter and their girlfriends ever go to the club? Maybe their girlfriends were those dancers I’d seen moving in the dark. Would I see these guys back there later on? Or did they have more important things to do than drink and watch strippers? And did I look out of place? Did I look like a westerner? Or like a chorus boy? How many John Rottams came in every week? On tours some waitress would always ask if you were with the Company, even if they’d never been in a real theatre in their lives. They recognized us. They fed us, and our egos. But now I was so far away from that, and even further from anything I knew. Maybe the waitress would ask if I worked in that bunker over there.
There was a fancy diner that my parents took me to on Sunday nights for roast chicken and mashed potatoes. I would sit hands crossed. “Quit staring,” Dad would say. But my heart would go out to any sad, old cowboy sitting alone eating a hamburger. I imagined that if the rustler’s cheeks weren’t full, or if he swallowed, he might cry. The same went for a homely girl alone in a booth with puckered lips peeking into a compact, trying to look pretty, pretending she was waiting for someone. I wanted to tell them it was okay. I was sure I knew exactly how they felt. But they had their own stories, they’d get by, create a story to keep them from going crazy, like I had. Me and the lonely cowboy and the homely girl were in it together. It had something to do with comments at school, mostly about being the only one.
We sat in that fancy diner, and I stared at my parents and they stared out the window at our Cadillac. I wondered why they wouldn’t look at each other. What had I done? Was it really my fault that there were no other kids? Maybe God thought I was enough. How could I convince them that I was? Did everyone wonder why I didn’t have a sister at the table with me? I had to know. “Did you ask for more kids, Dad?”
“Ask who?”
“Ask God.”
“It’s not up to God.”
“Then who?”
“No one. Kids just happen, like accidents. No one can know when they will happen.”
“That’s nonsense. What your father meant was that they happen like surprises.”
“Do all these people have kids?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“So not everyone has kids?”
“No.”
“But…”
“There’s only one thing that matters in your life and that’s to keep good care of your teeth. You can worry about kids when you get older.”
“Brothers and sisters?”
“Sons and daughters.”
I could go insane wondering why I was sitting in a diner on rue Lévesque. I was beyond the point of no return. If Lisa had invested her time and attention in my beginnings as a dancer, she must have believed in me; she was my first ballet teacher and she said I could do it. She was the very first to say I could be a real honest-to-God dancer. After all, she had danced with the Company in the corps. True, it was short-lived; her centre of gravity was too low and her thighs too big. Any dancer would know she’d never be a principal or a soloist. Still, an ovation was due for any female who got that far, and with her handicaps. The competition among women to make their lifelong dream to be a princess come true is nothing a man, other than one like myself, can ever comprehend. To want to be a ballerina must be the most alluring and devastating dream in the world—other than maybe the dream of having your own pon
y. Every woman wants to be a ballerina at some point—it demands absolute pristine and holy perfection—and if they don’t make it, they can be satisfied that everything else will always be second best.
I left Lisa and the hometown studio. University in Saskatoon, the alibi, appeased my parents and off-campus I tracked down a brooding dancer, Drake, from the Company days gone by, who taught me how to dance like a man, between screaming at the little girls with bun-pulled faces. I took his classes six days a week. “You don’t have to worry, you won’t be paying.”
To add to it, I found a group of extremely talented ex-ballerinas in the campus gym—most within a whisper of having made their dreams come true. But circumstances, family, genetics—their bodies hadn’t been perfect enough, arches high enough, chests flat enough, hips boyish enough, nothing proportioned enough—decided for them. Now they danced for the love of it they’d lost, along the way, among the competition and heartbreak. I danced with them in a brand new vacant studio used for nothing other than cheerleading practices between scheduled lectures in dim auditoriums and naps in the stale library. They were pushy and demanding, pre-law and pre-med, and I was so grateful. I stretched my arches under radiators until they stung. Forced splits in my doorway. Dared my hamstrings to snap. Ate, slept and dreamed dance. Took class with tight-lipped Drake. Learned what male dancers do on the ground and in the air. I had somehow pulled together a homemade full-time dance schedule. Now, in Quebec, I was cobbling together another life.
I finished my bottomless refill of day-old coffee, wiped my mouth, wiped my mind clean of these characters, paid, stepped outside, inhaled, pressed my shoulders back, ignored my growling stomach, stuck out my chest, made like I was a star and headed back along the edge of the highway, into the dusk and onto a bar stool to wait for the show to begin.