Ballet Boy
In Dueling with O-sensei, I presented the story of the ballerina who had a challenge match with a taekwondo black belt. Here’s another ballet story that definitely deserves retelling.
My wife was a principle dancer for the American Ballet Theatre, and for some years after she ended her career, she would teach during ABT’s summer intensives for young people. One year I went along with her, and after her class, ended up in a bar-restaurant, with a group of her colleagues, some of the greatest dancers of the mid twentieth century. One thing about retired ballet dancers: they end up in two forms. Half of them are stunning: elegant, noble men and women, the best looking older people on the face of the earth. And the other half are “F**k it. I trained since I was a child, I watched what I ate, I obsessed over every calorie and every movement of every muscle. No more.” And you’d never imagine they ever danced – they are overweight, lumpy, poor postured . . . but even so, they still have the best looking legs you could imagine.
So, we are all around the table, and it not being my crowd, I was just listening. And the subject got on to bullying, and how hard it still is for boys who want to be dancers. And one man, one of the ‘lumpy, bulky’ retirees began to speak. Were I to name him and you to look him up as a young man, you would see a demi-god. This man was once so handsome, so muscular and slim . . . but no longer. Anyway this is the story he told.
I grew up in a family of Irish Baltimore cops. My grandfather was a cop, my dad and all his brothers were cops, my five brothers were cops. I don’t know why, I was crazy for dancing from the time I was small. Any kind of dancing. My own family didn’t really know what to do with me, but their attitude was, ‘It’s your choice. And you take the weight if anyone has a problem with it.’ So, I started taking lessons at a pretty young age. I’d got to ballet class, hell, when I was in my teens, I sneak out of the house after dark and go to Burlesque shows, the strippers sometimes had some training, and for certain dances, back then, they’d want someone to partner them. It was risqué, not obscene like it is now. But like I said, I didn’t care what kind it was, just so I could dance.
Well, eventually, I was just starting high school, people found out about me doing ballet. And these five guys ambushed me, they pinned me down and punched me until half the bones in my face were broken. I was out of school a long time, I had to get things put back in place, but you know what? As soon as I could get out of bed, I was sneaking out of the house, taking dance lessons, going back to the Burlesque shows, everywhere I could.
Well, eventually, I go back to school. And it’s the same. Nah, it’s worse. Everyone knows what happened to me and people called me names – you know all the names – it was just hell. So one day I was sitting in class, and the guy behind me, he was the biggest bully in the school, football guy, of course, he started stabbing me in the back of the neck with his pencil. Stab. Three minutes. Stab. Five minutes. Stab. And I just snapped. I whirled around and grabbed him by the neck. And realized he was off the ground. I had been picking up girls and throwing them up into the air, catching them so smoothly their hair didn’t even get mussed up, over and over again. I was strong! I threw him headfirst over three desks into a wall and knocked him out.
So the teacher grabs me, takes me down to the principal’s office. I figure I’m going to be thrown out of school, but I didn’t resist, you didn’t in those days, and the teacher drags me in, tells the principal what happened. And the principal tells him he’d take it from here, the teacher leaves. I’m sitting there with my head down, he gets up from behind his desk, comes up to me. I look up, he says, “Stand up, son,” and I do, and he shakes my hand, says, “It’s about time. I was waiting for you to do that.”
So here we are at the table, he comes to this point in the story, we are all laughing and cheering, other people are looking over. The man smiles a minute and then as we quieted down, he leaned back in his chair and quietly said:
And remember those five guys? Over the next year, one by one, I hunted them down and I did far worse to each of them than they did to me.
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