Every Step You Take (5 page)

By this time my vivacious but completely innocent mother had begun to attract suitors, and in her amusing descriptions of each she never fails to comment on his ability to dance. Most didn't make the grade, but there was one tall, blond, and blue-eyed young man named Jack—a highway construction worker from Colorado—who seemed to have come close. Jack would show up at my grandparents' farm and literally carry Mom out of the house to the car, and then drive her to the middle of the reservation where they would turn up the car radio and dance the night away under the desert moon. “Boy, could Jack dance!” my mother comments. Jack loved watching my mother perform the hoop dance, and when she turned sixteen he offered my grandparents “five beautiful horses” for my mother's hand in marriage. “Of course my dad said no, because I was going to go to college,” my mother writes.

That was always the plan, for my mother to go to college, and by the time she graduated from high school my mother had a definite idea of where she wanted to go. “I took the scholarship that took me farthest away from home,” she says. In the summer of 1961, at age seventeen, she caught a train to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to attend nursing school. The trip to Philadelphia was the first train ride of her life and proved to be a miserable journey—she was sickened by all the cigarette smoke around her and bewildered when she had to change trains in Chicago. When she arrived in Philadelphia, she sat around the station for a long time, unsure of what to do next. When she finally called the school, whoever answered gave her the address and told her to catch a taxi. “I learned real fast that you do for yourself,” Mom concludes.

This last phrase of Mom's haunted me after I read it. It had been under different circumstances, and to a very different place, but I too had decided at a young age to move far away from my home in the Arizona desert. And I too had learned real fast that you do for yourself. I thought of the feral and unchaperoned life I led as a young boy alone in New York, and then of my innocent and naive mother setting off to live on her own in Philadelphia at age seventeen—I'm sure the two of us were equally clueless when it came to sex or anything else that adult life might entail. The similarities between Mom's life and mine were comforting—we might not have had as much time together here on Earth as we would have liked, but we had a lot more in common than I had ever suspected. And though I had dreaded opening my mother's computer, I found that I loved hearing her voice again and cherished all the new images I now had of her when she was just a young girl. I felt I was learning much about her, and about myself at the same time. It reminded me of a comment my fellow NYCB dancer Lourdes Lopez once made after meeting Mom: “When you meet the mother,” Lourdes said, “you understand the man.”

When I compared my mother's early childhood and my own, I was struck by the strange circles of irony that can stack up in life. When my mother was a toddler, her father broke with tradition and taught his little daughter the Navajo hoop dance, a ritual that was traditionally performed only by men and boys. Grandpa Bud taught his little daughter a dance that was meant only for boys, and then years later Mom taught the dance to me—her little boy, who was in some ways more like a little girl. I was also struck by how my mother and I, though our lives had started on the same reservation and our experiences were only one slim generation apart, could have such different attitudes and responses to the world around us. I thought about an “encounter” with a snake I had had as a young boy one hot desert afternoon, when Kiko and I and my mother's brother and youngest sister, Orlando and Rochelle (Shelley), who were about our age, had hiked to a distant mesa where we liked to go whooping and sliding down the dusty, dry gullies. It was not much of an encounter really—in fact, the three of them simply mentioned to me that they had seen a snake along the way—but that was enough for me. I ran all the way home, screaming and laughing at the same time, tears streaming down my face at the thought of my close call.

But my mother had
real
encounters with rattlesnakes in the desert, and
she
never ran home screaming. Quite the contrary: “My mother prepared us for such encounters by tying a small pouch of an herb that is used to keep snakes at bay to the bottom of our skirts,” she explains in one of her stories. Figuring they were protected from any possible harm, she and her sister Alice took turns jumping back and forth over a snake—“until we got tired or we tired the snake.” I thought about how my mother used to send me pouches of magic healing herbs whenever I was injured as a dancer, and how I would dutifully tuck them into my backpack and carry them around with me everywhere. But try as I might, I couldn't imagine there existed a pouch of any substance that could ever, under any circumstances, have induced me to casually jump back and forth over a rattlesnake. Was this because I was a misfit as a Navajo from the very beginning—just not made of genuine Native American–brave material? Or was it because the traditional Native ways had fallen off so much by the time I grew up? I wasn't sure why, but reading my mother's stories about her childhood awakened feelings of regret and remorse at having “lost” my original culture—I felt haunted by a phantom way of life that was my road not taken.

For years I had heard people talking about the laws of circular motion as applied to dance, but as I looked backward I seemed to be discovering the laws of circular motion as applied to family and life in general. I wanted to take all the new information I was gathering and break it down into beats, which is the language I understand best, to try to choreograph a kind of family hoop dance. But the more I tried to understand about my life and my family history the more I realized I didn't know. To fill in some of the holes I began to read—very tentatively—about various Native American traditions, and almost immediately I came across two ideas that fascinated me and helped me make sense of my situation. The first was the Native American belief in a circular, or “living,” past, as opposed to the linear past of Western European tradition. For American Indians the past is never over; every “then” still exists in the “now”—it just exists on a different level. This made perfect sense to me as I thought about a dancer's constant challenge to show, with his or her body, how moments in time are linked, connected, and interactive—“We exist in time,” as Mr. B had said. This concept of a “living past” was exciting to me because it implied that experience does not evaporate, so that if you miss the meaning of something the first time around, maybe you could go back and look again. In which case all those years that I had not spent with my family, as well as all the experiences I had enjoyed as a dancer with the NYCB, should all be—in some sense—still available for exploration.

The second Native American tradition that intrigued me was the intense physical and spiritual journey that Indian braves sometimes took, in search of their true self, called a vision quest. All my life I had been taught—by my mother and by my NYCB family—that I should try to move through life with truth and beauty and meaning. I realized that in order to do so now, given the recent changes in my life and the unknown topography of the future, I would need to embark on a vision quest through my living past, to try to see and feel all kinds of things I had not managed to see and feel before. If I could understand more about the steps I had or had not taken in my past, then maybe I would feel ready to choreograph my future.

T
HERE HAVE BEEN
times when I have found my multistranded heritage as a half Navajo, half Puerto Rican, All-American, dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker confusing. But as the years have passed I have become more comfortable with my unusual blend of family legacy and cultural experiences. I sometimes use cooking as a secret language, and at a small dinner party I recently hosted I decided to serve four different desserts: Navajo Fry Bread, Puerto Rican flan, American apple pie, and New York cheesecake. My guests were surprised by the bounty, but none of them guessed that there was a message in my madness.

My grandma Rachel taught my mother this recipe for Navajo Fry Bread, and my mother in turn taught it to my brother, Kiko, and me. Kiko became quite the expert Navajobread chef (and still is), and as young boys the two of us ran our own Fry Bread concession at various rodeos and powwows all over the Southwest. I would love to eat Fry Bread every day—but then I would be as big as a house.

______

SERVES 12

4 cups all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon baking powder

1½ cups lukewarm water

4 cups vegetable shortening or vegetable oil for frying

In a large bowl, combine the flour, salt, and baking powder. Add the lukewarm water slowly, kneading the mixture until it is soft but not sticky. Shape the dough into about 3-inch balls—you should have enough for 12 balls. On a floured surface, flatten the balls into patties and then roll them out to about ½-inch-thick circles.

On high (the surface of the oil should be shimmering but not smoking), heat the shortening in a large heavy skillet and fry the bread circles one at a time until nice and golden. Transfer the fried bread to a plate covered with a few paper towels. If you want to use the fried bread as a dessert, sprinkle the circles with powdered sugar and serve with honey. If you are going to eat the fried bread with chili or make a Navajo taco with meat sauce or beans with cheese, then salt the disks instead.

______

But the love of adventure was in Father's blood
.

—W
ILLIAM
F
REDERICK
“B
UFFALO
B
ILL
” C
ODY

W
hen my mother was alive, my father and I rarely had a telephone conversation that lasted longer than thirty seconds. He would always say, “Okay, Hon, well, here's Mom,” and pass the phone to her. When I was very young and first living alone in New York I would get offended by this, not just because Pop seemed to have nothing to say to me, but also because he had called me “Hon.” It was well-known in our family that before I was born my father had been hoping I would be a girl, and he always called my brother, Kiko, by the more manly nickname “Pop.” I knew my father disapproved of gay men—as a child, before I even understood what he meant, I had heard him make fun of homosexuals by calling them “faggots”—but no one had ever talked to me about the issue of my own sexuality. (I know now that it must have been pretty obvious to others from early on that I was gay, even if not to me.) As I got older and more aware, I couldn't help resenting the disapproval, or at least the attitude, in the nickname my father had chosen for me. The desire to keep our telephone exchanges brief became mutual.

In the weeks immediately following Mom's death, however, my father and I began to call each other quite regularly, sometimes every day, and for the first time in our lives we even began to have some long talks. I was eager to connect with him on a new level and was full of questions as I explored my “living past,” trying to fill in the blanks of my own and my parents' histories. He was lonely and at loose ends, traveling around the Southwest in his RV, trying to outrun the sadness that settled around him whenever he stopped moving. I never knew where he would be calling from, and in one of our late-night exchanges Pop announced that he had decided to go to Puerto Rico to visit his parents—my ninety-six-year-old grandmother and ninety-two-year-old grandfather—in their dilapidated hillside shack in a rural area of Puerto Rico. He said he needed to see them because there was a matter he had to put to rest. I had a hunch I knew what he was talking about, and it made me nervous.

My father has always believed that his father is not his biological father. For years he has told my brother and me that the tall green-eyed neighbor who lived next door to his parents looked like him—and that the big-eared, short person that his mother lives with, the supposed father whom he calls Don Lolo, did not. When I was growing up and during all my years dancing I never paid much attention to my father when he muttered these suspicions. But in my newly tender state as the motherless son of a widowed father, I found myself thinking about what it must have been like for Pop to carry such a painful doubt around inside him all his life. My father is a tall and handsome man, six foot one with a strong build and greenish eyes and thick white hair that was blond when he was younger. It is difficult to imagine anyone pushing him around, but he has told me and Kiko that Don Lolo used to beat him regularly when he was a little boy—sometimes with a belt, sometimes with a broomstick.

“He had a thick belt. He was a carpenter,” Pop confirms when I ask him about this in one of our conversations. “Mom used to get in between Lolo and me when he started using his belt—she would be taking the shots for me.” Finally a day came when my father was big enough and mad enough to grab the broomstick away from Don Lolo and threaten him back. “I was fourteen,” he says, “but I was almost six feet tall already. Lolo was still five foot two.” By that time Pop and his family had moved from Utuado, the small town in Puerto Rico where he was born and spent his first eight years, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Already he had established a pattern of constant rambling.