Every Step You Take (10 page)

After several months of classes at Westside in Santa Monica, Lisa and I both started taking classes at the Los Angeles Dance Center, the affiliate school of the Los Angeles Ballet, with the famous Russian ballet teacher Irina Kosmovska. One of my classmates at my new school (where Mme Kosmovska put us through the longest combinations I believe I have ever suffered in my life) was a startlingly beautiful and talented ballerina named Darci Kistler, who was one year older than me; another was a big-jumping, dark-haired firecracker named Teresa Reyes. By the fall of my seventh-grade year, Darci had been offered a full scholarship to attend Balanchine's School of America Ballet—my old, if fleeting, alma mater—and moved to New York. I didn't talk about this much with anyone, but I still hoped I would one day return to New York and to my former school, and watching Darci head off on her adventure helped me focus on this as a goal. When the NYCB dancer Susan Hendl, whom Mr. B sent out to scout for talent, came through Los Angeles that winter, I auditioned for the SAB summer program. To my delight I was accepted and offered a full scholarship.

This time when I headed east, my parents—perhaps assuming, or maybe hoping, I would be back at the end of the summer—stayed home. As it happened, Lisa Goldin and Teresa Reyes and I had all been accepted for that summer session in 1979, and Lisa and her mother were kind enough to invite me to share an apartment on West Sixty-sixth Street that they had sublet from a NYCB dancer who was in Saratoga Springs for the summer. (Lisa and I by this time had settled into an awkward relationship in which I tried to be a good pretend boyfriend by being a good girlfriend instead.) I was excited to be back in New York and back at the SAB, and as I began to apply myself more seriously in classes, my attitude toward ballet matured from one of happy industry to one of passion and obsession. I threw myself into my dancing as I never had before. It was an exciting time as I explored a twin love—for ballet and for New York. When the summer session was almost over I was told to report to Natasha Gleboff's office, and when she told me the school was once again offering me a full scholarship as a full-time student for the upcoming winter course, I was thrilled. I had made it back to New York and back to SAB, and this time I was going to make sure that I stayed.

L
ITTLE DID
I know, on that day long ago when I was first invited to become a full-time student at SAB, just how long I would be staying. And little did I suspect that some thirty years later I myself would be auditioning young dancers and offering them scholarships to the school. Teaching is always a learning experience for me, and not too long after my mother passed away I had an exciting new challenge when Peter Martins decided to include a little piece I had choreographed for my intermediate-level boys' class in the SAB's annual end-of-year Workshop Performances. The kids worked like demons, and I was amazed at how good they were. Afterward I decided to thank them with a surprise graduation dinner. In the last week of school I posted a sign declaring a mandatory meeting in the teachers' lounge on Friday.

The night before the surprise feast, I cooked four dishes in bulk—Thai beef with cellophane noodles, couscous salad, tomato-and-mozzarella salad, and Mom's famous Paradise Valley potato salad. I packaged the food in gallon-size freezer bags, and made a megaload of brownies and bagged them too. The next morning I packed all of the freezer bags along with platters and serving utensils into a large rolling suitcase and took my banquet-in-a-bag with me on the subway to work. When the students showed up for the alleged meeting I surprised them with their feast. They were a little shy at first, but they quickly found their dancers' appetites, and the meal was a roaring success.

______

SERVES 8

This recipe for Mom's potato salad serves about eight, but it is easy to triple or quadruple the ingredients for a crowd. It is rich and creamy—and always a hit. Making it ahead of time and refrigerating it for a few hours—or even overnight—makes it even better. I have experimented with adding curry, cumin, ketchup, paprika, and even jalapeños. You can use sour cream instead of mayonnaise and Dijon mustard instead of classic yellow mustard. In fact, anything is possible—I sometimes serve this in the middle of winter with hot dogs!

8 large red potatoes

8 large eggs

1 medium red onion, chopped

4 stalks of celery, chopped

1 orange bell pepper, chopped

6 spears of dill pickles, diced

1½ cups mayonnaise

5 squirts (or about 4 tablespoons) yellow mustard

3 tablespoons pickle juice

Salt and pepper

Wash your potatoes and cut them in fours, placing them in a stockpot of cold water as you work. Bring the water to a boil over high heat, and then reduce the heat to gently boil the potatoes until they are just tender—about 20 minutes. You should test them with a fork, not a knife, because as Mom would say, “You should never stab your food.”

While your potatoes are cooking, place the eggs in a large pot of cold water, bring to boil, and then cover and turn the heat off. After 10 minutes (best to set a timer or you will forget) drain the eggs, rinse them under cold water, and set aside.

Place the onion, celery, bell pepper, and pickles in a large bowl and mix in your mayonnaise, mustard, and pickle juice. Peel and cut your eggs—I cut them in fours because I like them chunky—and add them to the bowl. When your potatoes are drained and cooled, add them and stir the whole mixture gently. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Cover and refrigerate for a couple of hours, so that all the flavors marry, and add salt and pepper again to taste before serving.

______

I was a veteran before I was a teenager
.

—M
ICHAEL
J
ACKSON

I
n the first year after Mom died, I often had to call my father to apologize for fighting, even though I didn't realize we had been fighting until Kiko called to enlighten me. This was the way things were, on and off, for months. Pop was so rattled and lost. One alleged argument started when we were talking on the phone, and out of the blue, Pop burst into tears and shouted, “Why do you dislike me so much? Why have you always hated me?” And then he hung up.

All I had done to provoke this was to tell Pop that I loved him and that I would send him some more money for his bills. Luis and I had been trying to pick up more and more of his expenses, paying his credit cards and other monthly debts. It was sad, because I could track his lonely wanderings around the country by the credit-card charges—a six-dollar dinner at Souper Salad in Santa Fe, a four-dollar meal at McDonald's in Gallup, New Mexico, a tank of gas in Chinle, Arizona. This last charge, in fact, was how I discovered at one point that Pop had driven back to the reservation to visit Mom's sisters and have a session with my uncle Joe, our medicine man. Evidently they all asked him to come live with them, and let them take care of him—which strikes me as highly ironic given that for so many years everyone in Mom's family disapproved so strongly of my non-Navajo father. The idea of my father living on the reservation was preposterous—there is nothing there but a gas station, a Burger King and a McDonald's (can't have one without the other), and a grocery store called Bashas. You can get two channels on the TV. Sure enough, when Pop went there, he didn't last a week. He told me it was too hot, there was nothing to do, and there was nothing on the television, so he got bored and he left. That's my dad.

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.