Madam K’s ballet studio, West Hollywood, California / November, 1981
Jackson’s legs hurt. No, screamed. Not even a week in and ballet class made his old high school football practices look like two-a-days for pussies Today would be a good day to —
“It’s like totally not right, Kenny! It’s so-o totally, completely, mega fucking wrong!”
A pink ripstop Capezio ballet bag zipped in front of him, exploded against the old oak sign-in table to his right, knocked over the fan that sat on top. Several rolls of sport tape, a flimsy black ballet skirt, toe shoes and pink floor shoes, a couple of tampons, Capezio logo t-shirts, an illegal in Madam K’s class leopard print leotard, hair brush and maybe a thousand bobby pins scattered out, one of the rolls of tape wobbling away like an old tire.
He looked to his left and a dancer who’d introduced herself as Logan somebody in the round robin of intros his first night side-armed another roll of tape that he fielded left handed. The other pre-class usually warming up dancers were against the far wall, a huddle of pink tights, black leotards and hair buns. A couple of the older ones, the mom age never-give-up-ballet-class types formed an outer circle, an attempt to protect the younger ones from Logan who was screaming, flouncing herself around, crying and babbling about never dancing again and fuck this and fuck you and fuck doctors and fuck everybody. Especially fuck Kennedy Costigan the reincarnationist space case hired gun ballerina who was right in front of Logan and taking the brunt of the abuse. Jackson figured this was down to Kennedy and Logan being the only pros in the room, both of them on rehab hiatus from some big deal dance company in New York.
“Ten years, and like adios, Logan, you’re done, motor. Godammit it’s so-like totally unfair to the max!”
“Logan, you’re letting your positive energy get way from you and wasting it on –”
“Shut up, Kenny. Bag it, ’kay? Just shut up! You, you get to dance now and it’s so not, not,” she spun around as if no one could see her full-blown end-of-the-world-and-my-life-as-I-know-it-face in the mirrored wall. Saw it herself and turned back.
“Logan, I had surgery. I’m telling you that you need to use this emotion, this energy, to get past whatever is holding you back.” Kenny put her hands in front of her chest, swept them slowly out and down then up in a wide arc. “Breathe, Logan. This is how we grow.”
“Get real, Kenny. I am like full grown and like breathing or I’d be dead, duh, a’right? What’s holding me back is like this mega stupid tape. Look at it!” She held her left leg straight out, flat footed and perfectly balanced on the right. “And like the gag me with a chainsaw totally dweeb hosers ‘it takes time’ doctors, and, and like you and your ‘listen to your bod, Logan.’ As if! What’s it going to say, Kenny? Huh? Gee whiz, Logan, you’re like a so totally lame poser dancer person now and you can’t dance anymore and you like barf me out when you even like try?” She looked past Kenny at the dancer huddle. “And like for real I’m so sure you’re all psyched. ‘Logan can’t dance, did you see her spazz her jeté? Now she’s a totally wiggin’ loser’…” She made a defiant face, brought her leg down after what seemed like an eternity to Jackson, dropped in the wooden chair nehind her and folded over, shoulders to knees like a dying ballet rag doll.
Madam Konstanova breezed through the door, ever present clipboard and cassette in hand, immediately registered the entire room, devil eyed the debris field. “Miss Bevan-Burns, are you quite through? This is a dance class, not personal anger therapy. You will pick up your things…Mr. Jackson, that is Miss –”
“Her mess, I know.” He stuffed the wad of clothes and tape in the pink bag. “Give me a minute?”
“Mr. Jackson, I do not think you –” Kenny put a hand on her arm.
“Jackson is an old soul.”
“Of course he is, Miss Costigan.” Madam K rolled her eyes, set her clipboard down. “Aren’t we all?” She righted the fan and stood with folded arms.
Jackson knelt, thighs screaming, in front of the dead ballerina doll’s color of a perfectly baked biscuit ballet bun.
“Hey.”
“Hey what?” The bun didn’t move. Knees slightly apart, feet together, one flexible ankle folded over on the floor, the other flat footed, a cast of athletic tape around the back half of her foot. He reached for bulk of taped ankle, she pulled it away under the chair.
“NO!” She raised her head, not her body, tears still smearing her cheeks. “Leave it a-lone! It’s screwed and I’m, I am so-o totally toast and you can’t like fix it, you’re like, like a street guy, not even a dancer. Nobody can fix it.” He pulled her foot back out.
“Tape’s gotta go, Logan.” He looked over his shoulder. “Scissors?”
Madam K opened a drawer in the sign-in desk, brought him a pair of long, thin, knife like barber’s scissors.
“NO! Don’t! I can’t watch. NO-OH!” Logan wailed in full drama queen, twisted her entire upper body a hundred and eighty degrees to her hips.
“What’s your mom call you when she’s mad?”
“Huh? Like seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Oh.” She lost the glum for a second. “Um, Godammit Logan?”
“No,” he slipped the blade of the scissors behind her ankle bone, “your whole pissed off mom name.”
“Godammit Logan Nicole?”
“That’s it?”
“She like always never said all of them, Godammit Logan Nicole Bevan-Burns.” Logan snuffle snort laughed. “She’d like have totally forgotten what she was mad about if she yelled all of them.” She quit fighting his hand on her foot. “I like thought my first name was Godammit, you know, until, well, I went off to mega bitchy skinny old men and witches ballet teacher Nazis school, who like totally forgot all our names and yelled godammit at all of us for-ever.”
“Yeah? What’d they yell about?”
“Everything. Eat this, don’t eat that, drink more water, stretch more, get over your hips, where’s your extension and like we neh-ver got to bounce from dance class. Neh-ver. Dance. Get yelled at, dance, dance, dance.”
“Madam K’s not that bad, is she?”
“That was at Sob, not here.”
“Sob?”
“Oh, like duh. School of American Ballet? When I was 12 I like got a scholarship. Named after a car.”
“The Buick fund for future ballerinas?”
“Are you like totally dance blank? Ford.” She paused. “I think.”
He could see her watching the red SUSHIRAMA sign from across the street flash in the mirror, hoped it would hypnotize her while he made small eighth-inch progress snips in the tape.
“Are you like into sushi, Jackson?”
“No. I –”
“It’s like raw fish, right?”
“Yeah. I tried it once, wasn’t sold. Like oysters. Both were lost on me.”
“Oy-sters?” She sob laughed again. “Oy, oy! Like why not Oy-oy-sters. Grody?”
“Maximum grode factor. A guy I was in a band with, he took me to a seafood place when I was 16, and everyone was shooting oysters.”
“Shooting them? The little rock things in the cold place at the back of Safeway? Like with guns? That’s like, like so wrong.” She saw herself in the mirror. “Like me.”
“Nothing’s wrong with you but some bad advice. And the shooting wasn’t with guns. Where we were the oysters came on a big plate, already open, and the people covered them in hot sauce and slurped them down. They called it shooting.” He felt her leg relax more, kept snipping.
“Like in one bite? Guh-ronk?” She gulped for effect, trying invisible oysters. “How big are they?”
“Well,” he was getting close to having the tape off. “The only way I can describe them is like the way this guy who took me did. I asked him, you know, what were Oy-oy-sters like and he said ‘Jailbait, no way we gonna eat that shit. People can’t put enough hot sauce on them damn things to make ‘em right.”
“No?”
“No. He said only really sick puppies would eat something that looked like it fell out of a cow’s nose.”
She snapped back around, eyes wide. He wished he had it back. Was it the sick puppies she’d go off on or…Her eyes got wider and she grabbed the tops of his shoulders.
“Ohmahgawd. Oy oys. They’re like…hugh-go SNOTS? Like when you’re not totally sick anymore, but kinda, and you cough and like this com-pletely gross mess jumps into your mouth from the back? And it’s like get rid of it now, don’t like swallow it or it’s technicolor yawn time?”
“Yeah.” The tape popped off. “Like exactly, totally like that.”
“Ohmahgawd, Jackson! Octopus!”
“Octopus? Wha –”
“I know. Yuk-oh, right? Betcha can’t eat it.”
“Yeah?”
“For real. Some old tuxedo and flowers man? He like took us all to dinner and told us it was like some delicacy, right, and I like chewed a bite like a biggo gum wad till I thought I was about to turn into a cheerleader or something. And like it was still there. So I, um, well, like kinda coughed it into my hand and dropped it under the table…And Squid! Like how can anyone like eat something called…” Her whole face relaxed, her lips pulled in to a small pucker. She looked down. “My foot. It’s…free. You like…what?”
“Who taped this?”
“Uh…A doctor? Or a guy like a doctor, only isn’t but works there? And like wears doctor clothes and waaaaaay too much cologne and like con-stantly smiles like a Halloween pumpkin thing? I go every other day or, well, it like gets totally sweated out and,” She wrinkled her face again. “But they say I can’t like dance without it, so…” The tears started to come back.
“Can’t like dance with it, either. Lighten up Ms. Godammit Logan Nicole Bevan-Burns. You’re close to right as we speak.” He picked up the roll of tape he’d caught, tore a strip. “Tie your shoe.”
She wrapped the pointe shoe ribbon around her ankle, tied it off. Wiggled her foot, winced.
“Ohmahgawd. Over my pointe shoe?”
“Yeah. Watch this, you’ll need it.” Jackson had no idea how anyone could bend that far over from seated but she did, and watched, engrossed, while he wrapped the piece of tape under her heel, around her Achilles, across her ankle, pulled it tight before he smacked it open handed to set it.
“Ow!” Her eyes came up from his hands, found his. “Is that like, re-quired?”
“Yeah. Sets the tape.”
“‘Kay.” She dropped her head, watched as he tore another strip and came at her heel, Achilles and ankle from the other side, smacked it. He stood, took her hand, pulled her out of the chair. She hit pointe, wobbled a little, found it.
“Oh…mah…GAWD. What? How? That is so…” she pirouetted, stopped dead still, raised her right leg, dropped it on his shoulder, her arms wide, added a hand flourish that sent her fingertips skyward. She bent forward, all huge eyes in his face. “How?”
“I knew, lived with a girl who was an exercise junkie. She went on vacation with her parents, got her stupid on and crashed a parasail into the Atlantic Ocean, feet first. She was taped up like you, only both feet. She did the Frankenstein walk for about a week until her brother the All American sent her to the sports doc where we were in school. The doc hooked her up the way you are now. He said some Japanese guy had figured out flexibility with support for athletes who needed to move and that she’d never get any strength back with her feet locked up in tape. I got her tape duty until she stopped needing it. You good?”
“Bonus! Yeah!” She spun away, three, four, five tight turns, caught her usual place on the the first barre and curtsied, her face as red as a cherry. “Sorrr-eee, everybody.”
Madam K clapped twice, icicles hung from “Ladies…and Mr. Jackson.” The huddle against the wall broke, classical piano music seeped out of the battered jam box, the volume undulating in a slow tremolo with the movement of the oscillating fan. Jackson found his place at the far end of the third barre and thought about Logan and snot and octopus chewing cheerleaders. It helped him make it through another class. For the first time without any involuntary groans accompanied by fuck me.
***
Madam K, clipboard clutched in one arm, stopped him by blocking the door after his post class duties as the male balancing stump for dancers needing to work with a prop.
“Mr. Jackson I do not believe Miss Burns will be able to tape herself.”
“You watch.” He worked himself into his sweatshirt. “As bad as she wants to dance? She’ll tape.”
“You have a great deal of confidence in someone, who, were she unable to dance as she does, would surely have been killed by now.”
“What I’m sayin’. Nobody who dances like Logan could be as big a bimbo as she puts up. She just needs to talk to somebody besides dancers once in a while.”
“Perhaps.” Madam K tapped her lips with the eraser end of a pencil. “In the event she has difficulty?”
“Send her to USC sports med and they’ll make her better than she was. Sending her’s not a bad idea whether she can tape herself or not.”
“I didn’t want to like you, Mr. Jackson. My usual attitude toward musicians, particularly the young, modern set, is one of tolerant contempt. With you I may have to adjust my position. You do realize that you will never be a dancer?”
“You’re the second person to tell me that since Monday. And you know what?”
“Yes, I do. But please, don’t say it.” She stood aside to let him out. “Miss Burns’ episode was quite enough profanity for one evening.”
