Every Step You Take (18 page)

“I've got a secret, I've got a secret,” she kept saying, those intense blue eyes of hers dancing with mischief. “What?” I kept asking, but she refused to share. When the doorbell rang a little later, Heather insisted that I go answer it, even though I was at a crucial point in my kitchen duties. Slightly disgruntled, I walked over and threw open the front door. There stood Ulrik and Peter, wearing huge smiles and holding a magnum of Dom Pérignon.

“Congratulations, Jock! You've been promoted!” Peter shouted as he thrust the champagne toward me and then gave me a big hug.

I was stunned. I had moved to New York City seven years earlier at age thirteen to pursue my ballet dream, and now it seemed possible I might actually get a chance to climb the ranks and prove myself with the best of them. At age twenty, I had just become the youngest principal dancer with the New York City Ballet.

On that night when I was promoted to the status of principal dancer, Heather and Peter and Ulrik and I opened that big bottle of Dom Pérignon and drank every drop as we celebrated my happiness. I am sure we also must have sat down at some point to eat the dinner Heather and I had prepared, but I have no recollection of our meal after the initial toasts. From the moment Peter delivered his exciting news, I was elsewhere—floating about in a happy, far-off place I think they sometimes call cloud nine.

Years later, when Heather and I began working together on a cookbook containing some of our favorite meals, we decided to include our version of the recipe we served that evening. We christened it “Principal Pork,” and to this day it remains one of my favorite meals for celebrating milestone moments.

F
OR YEARS
I served the pork roast Heather and I dubbed Principal Pork as a special entrée for special occasions. The recipe involves taking a three-pound boned pork loin and rubbing it with cumin, fresh thyme, and minced garlic; then tying the roast into a long log and rubbing it with olive oil; and finally placing it in a roasting pan with a half cup each of orange juice and red wine, popping it in a preheated 350-degree oven, and cooking it for about an hour, or until a meat thermometer reads 160 degrees. Nothing could be simpler, right?

Well, how about a pork roast that you stick in a Crock-Pot in the morning, then go off to work and forget about for the rest of the day? The following
barbacoa
recipe offers a delightful Mexican twist (courtesy of Luis) on the more traditional pork roast. Your whole building will be jealous of the gorgeous smell wafting from your apartment all day. Serve it with corn tortillas (you can warm them in the microwave), rice and beans, green and red salsa, and the spicy guacamole that follows. You will be in pig heaven!

______

SERVES 8 TO 10

THE MARINADE:

2 ounces ancho chilies

4 ounces guajillo chilies

8 cloves garlic

½ small onion

3 sprigs fresh thyme

1 tablespoon dried Mexican oregano

1 tablespoon black peppercorns

3 tablespoons salt

4 fresh bay leaves

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

Juice of 1 large orange

THE ROAST:

5 pounds pork butt, bone in

18 dried avocado leaves (available at Mexican groceries or online)

12 fresh bay leaves

Half a bottle of your favorite Mexican beer (Tecate or Modelo, for example)

NOTE:
Before you do anything, make sure the pork butt fits inside your Crock-Pot. If you have a small Crock-Pot, you may want to use a 4-pound boneless pork butt cut into 2 or 3 pieces.

Remove all the seeds and veins from the chilies. Boil for 10 minutes, drain, and then puree the chilies in a blender with the garlic, onion, thyme, oregano, peppercorns, salt, bay leaves, vinegar, and orange juice. Add a little water to the blender if necessary to form a thick, smooth paste.

Rub the pork thoroughly with all of the marinade and refrigerate overnight.

Place the marinated pork with the avocado leaves and bay leaves inside a Crock-Pot, add half a bottle of your favorite Mexican beer, and cook for 10 hours on low. The meat will be falling off the bone, and indescribably delicious.

I have made many a guacamole in my life. This is the easiest and closest to a traditional that I have found. Luis and I like it very spicy so we use about ten serrano peppers with the seeds. I went to a restaurant called Rayuela in New York that added shrimp and crabmeat—it was delicious! So don't get nervous—just play around and have fun.

2 plum tomatoes, seeded and diced

1 medium white onion, finely diced

5 to 10 serrano or jalapeño peppers, seeded or not, finely diced

1 bunch cilantro, rinsed and finely chopped

4 ripe Hass avocados

2 ripe limes

Salt and pepper

Dice your tomatoes, onion, and chilies and chop your cilantro. Combine these in a large bowl.

Cut your avocados in half. Remove the pit by putting your knife lengthwise across the middle of the pit; gently pull the pit out and discard. Take the avocado meat out of the skins and add it to the bowl with your other ingredients.

Cut your limes in half and squeeze the juice into your mix. I take a potato masher at this point and mash the whole mixture up until smooth. Add salt and pepper to taste. It will take much more salt than one thinks. Taste, and then serve. Don't worry about the calories—you only live once!

______

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

—F
RIEDRICH
N
IETZSCHE

D
uring the week in June that my father and I spent together in Santa Fe shortly after my mother's death, while I was out there teaching for the Moving People Dance, we came up with what we thought was the brilliant idea of hosting a full-blown family reunion at the Eagle Nest house later that summer. The house wouldn't be finished, but we figured everyone could bring tents and sleeping bags. We would bring Mom's ashes and lots of food and have a party in her honor. I invited all of Mom's family, and several other friends—Pop and I were both excited. Almost immediately, however, the terrible alchemy of family gatherings began to boil and bubble. Mom's Navajo sisters started calling to say they were very upset that Mom's ashes had not yet been put in the ground—they said it was causing havoc of all kinds, and they didn't think they could attend the reunion. By the time August rolled around, my excitement about bringing all of my family together had been transmuted to dread.

The day for our August adventure finally came and Luis and I headed out to New Mexico, where Pop picked us up at the Albuquerque airport and drove us over the mountains in his RV to Eagle Nest. Pop had positioned a framed photograph of Mom against the windshield of the RV in a way that projected a magnified reflection of her face back at any passengers, and she was smiling out at me as we bumped our way through the twisting mountain roads. It was a little eerie. I sat in the big swiveling easy chair next to the driver's seat, where Mom always used to sit, and at one point Pop turned to me and told me it made him feel powerful to have me sitting there. Also eerie. Just as we were approaching Eagle Nest he announced that he had a special surprise for us—he had invited a few people from the community to meet me and have dinner with us the following night.

“That's nice,” I said. “How many?”

“Oh, I don't know,” Pop answered. “I put an announcement in the local paper: ‘Meet and Greet at a Dinner with Jock Soto, New York City Ballet Dancer and New Resident of Eagle Nest.' Somewhere between fifty and a hundred? We'll see.”

Luis and I looked at each other in disbelief. We hoped he was joking—but he was not.

The next day Luis and I got up early and shopped at the tiny Valley grocery and cooked like demons all day—grilled sausage with cannellini beans, penne Bolognese, tomato-and-mozzarella salad. Everything was ready just in time as the first guests began arriving promptly at five. About sixty people showed up in the end—everyone was very nice, and my father was especially proud that the mayor of Eagle Nest, a woman, attended. After dinner, as it began to get dark, someone hung a bedsheet over the fireplace and set up chairs and showed
Water Flowing Together
. I hadn't realized this would be part of the evening, and Luis and I chose instead to sit outside and admire the silence of the mountains and the amazing star-studded western sky I remembered so well from my youth. Our half-built house looked huge silhouetted against the night sky and the glistening lake beyond, and it already looked friendly and familiar too, as if it were waiting patiently for us to come back to it. Was it possible that after all these years in New York I might be able to make a home out west? The concept seemed wild.

A few days later the official “family reunion” weekend launched and various guests began funneling into the tiny mountain town—Kiko and his wife, Deb; Deb's aunt Carol and cousin Rick; Pop's friends Stu and Donna; my Navajo filmmaker friend Nanobah Becker; my nephew Trevor; Kiko's friends Kent and Lisa; my aunt Shelley and uncle Kevin and their son Andrew; my cousin Dawn and her partner, Jeannie; my former SAB classmate Jefferson Baum, who works nearby at the school of the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, and his girlfriend, Carla.

Mom's youngest sister, Shelley, was the only sibling who made it to Eagle Nest for the reunion, in the end. (Shelley is the baby of the family—twenty years younger than Mom—and the only one of Mom's siblings who also broke with tradition and married someone outside the tribe, my big, white-skinned, redheaded uncle Kevin.) We were a motley but happy crew, bound by either blood or friendship or both, as we gathered in the midst of a torrential downpour at the Lucky Shoe Saloon for our “reunion” celebration luncheon. It was not a particularly formal affair—we were surrounded by more television screens than I could count broadcasting every imaginable sports event, and conversations had to be fit between several highly competitive pool games (Kiko and Deb are both league players). Most of my mother's siblings were conspicuously absent, but for a few brief hours on a rainy afternoon, a respectable chunk of my extended “family” gathered to spend time together and celebrate one another. We ate, we drank, we toasted Kiko's and Kevin's birthdays. We toasted our beloved Mama Jo. We hugged, we laughed, we reminisced. We plotted, vaguely, for more gatherings in the future. And then, as the sun finally drove away the storm clouds and reminded us that there was still a bright day waiting out there, Luis and I paid the bill and we all left. I had survived my first stint hosting a “family reunion.”

When I got back to New York I was exhausted, and I was overcome by the same feelings that I used to get on the few occasions when I visited my family out west during my years with the NYCB: shock (tinged with guilt) at the differences between the worlds my biological family and I inhabited, and sadness at how little we knew about one another's lives. My feelings during the very rare occasions when my parents actually made it to New York to visit me were always just as confusing. I remember Mom and Pop coming to visit Ulrik and me once when we were living in an apartment on Twentieth Street. We had to move a television into the living room for my father, who even then had a hard-core addiction to the small screen. Pop sat there, glued to the TV all day, and at one point, without diverting his gaze from whatever he was watching, I remember he said, “Get me a drink, would you, Eric?”

“His name is Ulrik, and you'll get your own damn drink” was my rude response. Not attractive, but I was wrestling with all kinds of anger and suppressed emotions at the time, in large part because of my father's continued open and intense disapproval of homosexuals. Here they were, staying with me and my live-in boyfriend, and I
still
had not officially addressed the issue of my homosexuality with my parents. As it turned out, I would not find the courage to approach the topic until I was thirty, at which point my mother howled with laughter at my delusion that I could be “breaking any news.” But for years and years, my father's implied dissatisfaction with me and my own failure to be honest made visits with my parents incredibly unpleasant and tense. I think some part of me also must have been afraid that if I wasn't careful, the life I had worked so hard to leave behind would come crawling out of my parents' bodies as they sat there in my living room, passively watching TV, sneak up, and steal me back again.

With my promotion to principal dancer in 1985, the world I was living in became even more dramatically different from the world I had been born in. I began dancing more and more lead parts with Heather, but also with a dizzying array of other amazingly talented ballerinas—Maria Calegari, Judith Fugate, Patricia McBride, Darci Kistler, Stephanie Saland, Lourdes Lopez, Diana White, Kyra Nichols, and many others. In my late-night postperformance escapades I was spending all my offstage time with a glamorous new surrogate family that included Heather and Peter, Peter's son, Nilas, (also a NYCB dancer), Ulrik, and a few other dancers—most notably John Bass, Peter Boal, and Bruce Padgett—who were our closest friends. I remember hearing a rumor that some of the other dancers in the company referred to this inner circle as the “Royal Family” and feeling a twinge of discomfort. Somewhere inside me I sensed that there was something innately inappropriate about
my
being a member of an exclusive clique. But the situation was extremely seductive, and I pushed any misgivings away.