The Time of My Life (5 page)

The police in Bellaire had a reputation for being nasty and aggressive, and they certainly lived up to it that night. After they pulled me over, I tried to explain why I’d switched the plates, but the officers weren’t having any of it. They pinned
me hard up against a chain-link fence, frisked me, and put me in the back of their car to take me down to the precinct. I was under arrest.

I spent half the night in jail, until my dad was able to come down to bail me out. He didn’t have enough cash on him to do it, though, and there were no ATMs then. So I fished around in my pockets and gave the police the rest of my cash, too—including the lucky coin from Lisa.

Getting arrested and thrown into a jail cell certainly wasn’t the big send-off I’d hoped for. But at least the next day I was on my way, with fingers crossed that my luck in New York would be better than my luck on my last night in Houston.

My first apartment in New York City was at 45 West Seventieth Street. Unlike the clean, upscale neighborhood of today, the Seventies then were still rough around the edges. My street was at least decent, and affordable, and it had the bonus of being close to Central Park. But the apartment itself turned out to be less pleasant than the surroundings.

I was moving into a basement apartment with a fellow Harkness dancer, and as I descended below sidewalk level, I realized it wasn’t going to be pretty down there. The lack of natural light was depressing enough, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the rat droppings, the musty smell, and the water stains on the walls. My family didn’t exactly live in a mansion in Houston, but I could hardly believe this was the place I’d now be calling home—it was a hovel. At a Harkness trainee stipend of just forty-five dollars a week, though, it was all I could afford, even working extra jobs in my spare time.

I was scared to death about how my knee would hold up at Harkness. Part of me knew it was crazy even to have accepted the scholarship, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I’ve made a huge amount of headway in my life trading on the
invincibility of youth: Whether I was truly invincible or not, I operated as if I were, and to a certain extent believed that I was. This would be no different—I would just dance and suffer and grit my teeth whenever it hurt. And it would be worth all the pain when I made the leap from trainee to company member.

For all the fear I felt about my knee, I should have been equally afraid of the infamous Harkness regimen. In addition to the physical stress of dancing in up to six classes a day, torquing and twisting your joints and pushing your endurance to the limit, Harkness also put some of its dancers on a special diet aimed at virtually eliminating body fat. The Harkness diet allowed dancers to consume just five hundred calories a day— basically, lettuce and a few bites of turkey, plus vitamin shots.

And that wasn’t all. The Harkness doctors also came up with a shot that was supposedly made from the extract of a pregnant woman’s urine. This extract was said to encourage your body to live off its own fat tissue, so even those who had almost no body fat to begin with still dropped pounds, as the small deposits of fat between muscles melted away. I had always been lean, through constant training, but my arms and shoulders were big—I looked like Godzilla compared to the other male dancers. But under the Harkness regimen, I transformed my body. I dropped fifteen pounds and developed the streamlined physique of a dancer.

The women in Harkness had it even rougher. At this point, nobody had written an exposé like Gelsey Kirkland’s 1996 book
Dancing on My Grave,
which detailed the dark side of the professional ballet world. Gelsey was dancing with the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre at the same time I was at Harkness, and I often partnered her at pas de deux
class. The tales she told in her book of the rampant eating disorders, drug use, and emotional trauma that dancers faced matched what I saw during those years.

Female bodies aren’t really supposed to look like the bodies of ballet dancers, who are prized for their slender hips and prepubescent figures. So no matter how thin a dancer was, she was always encouraged to lose more by the Harkness tribunal, which kept tabs on dancers’ progress. “Lose five more pounds” was the mantra, even if the women had already shed pounds on intensive, crazy diets. The pressure was so bad that two women even died during my time at the ballet. They just pushed themselves farther than their emaciated bodies could handle.

Everything my mother had said was true—the amount of suffering you had to undergo to become a professional ballet dancer was overwhelming. I stuck to it, dancing and dieting to prove that I was ready to take my spot in the company. But the one thing I couldn’t control, of course, was my knee. And with the daily abuse of dancing, it got worse than ever.

As had happened during my days touring with Disney on Parade, my knee began swelling up like a balloon after I danced. I would always ice it to bring the swelling down, but at other times there was just too much fluid in the joint and I’d have to get it drained. This was an unpleasant procedure—I’d go to one of the company orthopedists who worked with Harkness, and he would insert a long needle into my knee to let the fluid out. There were times when the joint was so inflamed, I’d watch it swell right back up just after having it drained. Then I had no choice but to go home, ice it some more, and just hope it would be ready for class the next day. Yet even if it wasn’t, it didn’t matter. I’d have to dance anyway.

At one point, I felt a strange burning sensation I’d never had before, as if my knee was on fire inside. The joint swelled up worse than ever, and I began to worry that something was seriously wrong. I was taking antibiotics—some weeks I had to choose between them and food, as I didn’t always have enough money for both—but this felt like an infection. As it turned out, it was a fast-moving staph infection that ended up threatening more than just my dancing career.

When I went to the doctor to get it checked out, he told me I needed to stay overnight in the hospital for treatment. I told him that was impossible—I had too much to do. I couldn’t miss any classes, and I didn’t want anyone to think my knee wasn’t strong enough for the rigors of dancing.

The doctor looked at me with a grave expression. “Patrick,” he said, “this is a serious staph infection. If we don’t nip it in the bud, you could lose your leg.”

I stared at him, stunned into silence. I had been pushing myself so hard, it had never occurred to me that I could actually be putting my health in danger. Ever since I’d hurt my knee in that football game, I had forced myself to operate as if it was fine, as there was no other way to do all the things I wanted to. The doctor’s words scared me, but I knew that after I got it treated, I’d have to push on as before. I’d have to find a way.

If it hadn’t been for my knee trouble, I would have made the Harkness company already. Even though I had lost some weight and muscle mass, I was still a rarity in the world of ballet, a male dancer who actually looked like a man onstage. Most male dancers were slender and graceful, amazing dancers—but they didn’t look like what the ballet companies wanted. I knew that on the most fundamental level, the purpose of the male dancer
was to make the woman look beautiful, and my performances were geared toward exactly that. I aimed to look strong and masculine, and to present the female dancer in the best light I could.

I was a good partner, and a good soloist, which is a rare combination in the ballet world. For that reason, I was a sought-after dancer—which of course made me all the more reluctant to give up.

Amid all this dancing, dieting, and worrying, I had to find ways to bring in more money. The stipend wasn’t enough for anyone to live on, so despite the fact that we were often exhausted from workouts and rehearsals, many of the dancers worked extra jobs to pay the rent.

I worked for a time at a Hallmark card store, and also life-guarded at a subterranean men’s health club near my apartment. I sang and played guitar in the clubs down in Greenwich Village, which was a hotbed of creative energy, with artists on every corner and an exciting vibe. New York in the 1970s was very different from the New York of today—it was rough, a little wild, with an anything-goes feel to it. Energy seemed to pulsate through the streets, and being young there made you feel as if you could do anything. And that anything could happen.

The next job I got was a perfect example of that. In early September 1973, I got word that the Harkness Ballet’s benefactor, the oil heiress Rebekah Harkness, had specifically requested me for a rather unusual assignment.

Mrs. Harkness had commissioned Spanish artist Enrique Senis-Oliver to paint a gigantic mural for the brand-new Harkness
Theater then being built at Lincoln Center. Called
Homage to Terpsichore,
the painting stretched from the stage to the very top of the proscenium and down both sides, and consisted mostly of what
Time
magazine would later call “an agonized, thrusting morass of naked dancers.”

Well, those naked dancers were all me. Over a period of several weeks, I posed and flexed so Enrique could paint my nude form over and over in the mural. Enrique and I spent many exhausting hours perched on scaffolding thirty feet off the ground in the freezing theater while he painted the ceiling. As a thank-you he painted my face on the mural’s centerpiece—a towering twenty-foot-high portrait of me leaping naked toward the sun, with a cape of peacock feathers trailing behind me.

As a letter I wrote to Lisa right when I got that modeling gig shows, the fall of 1973 was a very good time for me in New York. I’d just returned after seeing her in Houston, and I was filled with the excitement of being young, in the city, and having my whole life ahead of me:

Well, Lisa,

I’m back! I was really dreading coming back while I was on the plane, but now that I’m back, it’s great! Everything is fine, my rent is paid, and everything is well at Harkness.

My first day was fabulous, I saw all my friends and had great classes. Plus Mrs. Harkness called the “House” and said she wanted me to do the modeling for the men’s bodies to be painted in the new theater! And they’re going to do a 20' portrait of me! Mrs. Hynes told me today, and it totally freaked me out! So I’m getting $25.00 per hour for modeling. Also the
artist wants me to do some modeling for portraits and some shows coming up! And I’ve got an audition for that club (singing) tomorrow….

I went walking tonight after modeling, and the street was bustling, and the fountain at Lincoln Center was so neat, and everything seems to be going my way, that I just started running and singing! People thought I was crazy but I didn’t care! …

Well, I’ve got tons of work ahead of me but I’m looking forward to it so much. There is hardly anyone in class because of the summer students being gone, and it’s really fine! You know, I didn’t leave sad Wednesday, I really felt good; that is about you. I know if
we
are meant to be, that we’ll get it together one day. Over such a short time, you’ve grown to mean a lot to me, I want to always be great friends. Work hard and maybe you’ll be up here before you know it!

I miss you much and hope it’s the same. Tell everyone “Hello” and I miss ’em, okay? Stay happy, and write!

Missingly yours,

Buddy

My feelings for Lisa were growing, but I was still scared to admit it outright—either to her or to myself. I was hoping against hope that she’d get a ballet scholarship, too, and come up to New York City. But at the same time, I hedged my bets by continuing to see other women, most notably a fellow Harkness dancer named Deleah.

Just a month after sending the letter above, I sent Lisa another one, dated October 16, 1973, in which I told her about Deleah.

Lisa, I think I have found someone I care for, a lot. Her name is Deleah Shafer. We started out incredible friends, and have steadily grown closer. She is on tour with the company now, so it gets kind of lonely sometimes. Lisa, I really hope this isn’t just a passing fancy, because I feel so much love in me now, that I need someone to give it to. I guess the only thing to do is wait and see.

I did like Deleah very much, but deep down I think I was hoping to make Lisa jealous. The rest of the letter is all about how I was dropping Lisa’s name at Harkness, trying to help her secure a scholarship—and I even offered to have her stay at my apartment whenever she did make it up to New York. “It will save quite a bit of money, if it would be cool on the ‘home front,’ ” I wrote, presumably with a straight face. I knew Lisa’s parents wouldn’t approve of her living with me in New York, but I wanted to plant that seed anyway.

After sending that letter, I even called Lisa for advice on dating Deleah, though it was probably really an attempt to find out how she felt about it. Despite the intensity of the feelings Lisa and I obviously had for each other, we both were trying very hard to protect ourselves. We both came to the relationship feeling like, “I don’t want this person to get to me”—we were afraid of being too vulnerable, afraid of getting hurt. So both Lisa and I made a big show of just wanting to be friends, at least until the other person made the first move.

If I hoped to make Lisa jealous, though, I obviously didn’t know her very well. In fact, she had a completely different response—but one that was ultimately far better than jealousy. As she later told me, she came to a turning point of sorts after I called her for advice about Deleah. She realized that more
than anything, she wanted me to be happy. The way she saw it, her feelings for me ran deeper than simply wanting to lay claim to me or own my attentions. She began to see me in a different light—as someone she cared really deeply for, rather than someone she just liked messing around and talking with.

Of course, I didn’t know any of this—I just knew that Lisa had reacted coolly to the notion that I had a new girlfriend. We kept writing back and forth and talking on the phone, though, so our relationship continued to grow even if we didn’t quite know where it was going. And it probably would have continued that way, except that in 1974, Lisa finally got her scholarship to Harkness. She was coming to New York City, and despite her mother’s hope that she’d move into the Barbizon Hotel for Women, she’d decided to take me up on my offer to live with me at my new place on West Seventy-fourth Street.