The Time of My Life (4 page)

I continued at San Jacinto, and the more time I spent away from home, the more I began to realize that there was a whole big world out there waiting to be explored. Even if I couldn’t be an Olympic gymnast, there were still a million other things out there that interested me. Yes, gymnastics had been my dream—and it stung like hell to know I’d missed my chance to achieve it. But I somehow knew instinctively that when one dream dies, you have to move on to a new one. The unhappiest people in this world are those who can’t recover from losing a dream—whose lives cease to have meaning. I wasn’t going to let that happen to me. It was a revelation that would later save my life.

Once again, I faced the question: What did I want to be? Who was Patrick Swayze, and what did he have to offer the world? I still wanted so much—to dance, to ice-skate, to sing, to act. I also wanted to become a pilot, and I learned that if I finished two years at San Jacinto, getting my associate arts degree in aviation, I could go into the military and hope to get into flight school. For a while, that’s what I decided I would do, even though the Vietnam War was raging on the other side of the world, sucking young men like me into its jungles and sending them home changed—if it sent them home at all.

But before long, I realized the performing bug was just too strong for me to consider doing anything else. I rehabbed my knee again and kept working out at Mom’s studio, building my strength and flexibility with the goal of performing again. And of course, being at the studio meant I would see Lisa, who was in my thoughts more and more.

I was still intrigued by this mysterious, beautiful girl, but she acted as cool as ever to me. But then came the moment we first danced together onstage. And suddenly, everything changed.

We were performing an exhibition of classical dance at a junior high school auditorium in 1972. Lisa and I had learned and rehearsed the pas de deux from the ballet
Raymonda.
Just before we stepped out onstage, I kissed her on the cheek for good luck, but that wasn’t the magic moment. The magic happened when she took my hand to start dancing, and our eyes locked.

It felt like an electric charge suddenly coursed through my body. I looked into Lisa’s eyes, and it was as if I was seeing her for the first time. We moved together as one, and I felt a stirring deep in my soul. It was a fleeting moment, but I never forgot it. But after the dance was done, I didn’t mention it to her, afraid that the feelings had been mine alone.

Not long after that, we were paired up in yet another dance—one that threatened to make it embarrassingly clear how I felt about her. We were at my mom’s studio, rehearsing a more avant-garde dance with some pretty provocative moves. At one point, I was supposed to ease Lisa down onto the floor and then lie on top of her. Well, you can imagine the effect this had on me, a healthy twenty-year-old guy wearing tights.

The dance called for us to lie like that for a long, long while. I felt shy and could never look her in the eye, but it was the first time I really got to smell her. And she smelled
good
. When it was time to move away, I was afraid that someone might note my “primal stirrings,” and quickly turned away to stretch and adjust my legwarmers. Needless to say, I couldn’t wait for the next rehearsal.

Now it was clear that I really liked her, so I went ahead and
asked her out on a date. But when you start to like someone who used to be a friend, you get shy—and that’s how I felt. I suddenly didn’t know what to do with myself when I was around her. Fortunately, she did agree to go out on a few dates with me, but they were hardly the stuff of great romance.

First, I’d show up at her house, and one of her five tall, steely Nordic brothers would answer the door. He’d give me the third degree—Where was I taking Lisa? What time would I bring her home?—before she finally came out and we could get out of there. Then, we’d go to dinner and have awkward conversations, which basically consisted of me telling her about how great I was and her seeming utterly unimpressed. I just didn’t have any idea how to talk to a girl—or anyone, for that matter. But I knew I liked her, and I wanted her to like me. I just didn’t have any idea how to make that happen.

As my time at San Jacinto drew to a close, it looked as if I might not even get a chance to try. As I was mulling over what my next step might be, I got invitations to join the Ice Follies, Holiday on Ice, and Disney on Parade traveling shows. I loved ice skating, and joining one of the ice shows would mean pairing up with an excellent partner, Rulanna Rolen. But I loved dancing—and the idea of playing Prince Charming—even more. So despite lingering knee troubles, I signed up to join the Disney on Parade traveling company as it toured all over the United States, Canada, and Latin America. It was time to see the world.

Disney on Parade was a huge traveling show, with dozens of dancers and a giant stage set. We would perform in arenas and coliseums, with billowing blue lamé curtains, a full-scale castle
with towers, and a huge egg-shaped screen projecting the stories of
Snow White, Fantasia,
and other Disney classics. I was excited to have my first performingjob outside Houston—and excited to be traveling to places I’d only read about in books.

The dancers made $125 a week, which felt like a lot of money, especially since we all doubled, tripled, and quadrupled up in our living arrangements on the road. Most of the dancers were women, and of the few who were men, even fewer were straight men. So the opportunities for me in terms of finding women to date were just about endless.

Unfortunately, I still didn’t know how to communicate with women, or anybody else. I just sounded like an egotistical ass whenever I talked, as I couldn’t stop going on and on about myself. For one thing, my knee kept blowing up after each performance, the joint swelling painfully due to the rigors of the show. One dance in particular—the Russian Cossack dance, where you do repeated deep pliés with arms folded and legs flying—caused me no end of trouble. It got so bad that I had to go to the hospital in every city to get the fluid drained from my knee. And the more knee trouble I had, the more I had to talk about it.

But after I had initially alienated just about everyone with my incessant blathering, people started realizing that I wasn’t really egotistical, just insecure. And after a while, they started to accept and even befriend me. I ended up making a ton of friends during Disney on Parade and began to understand that I didn’t have to win everybody all the time—that in fact, trying to win people only drove them away. Like a puppy learning not to chew on things, I trained myself not to talk about myself all the time.

I began dating one woman who was in the show, a good-looking
blonde who had a party-queen reputation. She was a wild one, the kind of girl who liked trouble, and at first I was drawn to her dangerous air. Part of me just wanted to see if I could win her, but once I did, I realized she wasn’t at all the kind of woman I was looking for. It sounds corny, but I really did believe in Snow White and Prince Charming—I wanted to find a woman whom I could ride off into the sunset and share my life with. I’m not sure I was even aware of it at the time, but subconsciously I was comparing all the women I met to Lisa.

Meanwhile, Lisa was back in Houston having problems of her own. She’d been having a lot of trouble sleeping, and her insomnia eventually got so bad she had to drop out of high school. She’d always had trouble fitting in, and now, with the onset of a creeping depression, she felt even more alienated. This was the beginning of what she later called her “blue period.”

Things at home were tough, too—her parents had a very contentious relationship, and their dynamic affected the entire family. Eventually, Lisa began lying awake at night in fear. Her house didn’t feel like a safe place emotionally, and she began to feel an overpowering sense that if she walked out the door of her bedroom in the middle of the night, she’d be eaten by wolves. It wasn’t a rational fear, but this was a scary time for a teenage girl who had come to feel that no place was safe for her. Finally, she decided that she had to get out of her parents’ house, at least until things cooled down a bit. So one day at the studio, she asked my mom if she could come stay at our house for a while.

My mother, who could be so hard on her own kids, had come to adore Lisa. For one thing, Lisa had started dancing incredibly late—no serious female dancer starts in her teens,
as Lisa had. But Lisa was so determined, and so gifted, that my mother invested all her teaching skills and all the nurturing she could muster to help her out. Lisa had experienced a life-changing moment at age fifteen when she made a conscious decision to pursue dancing seriously. She’d stopped smoking dope and began working out at my mom’s studio seven days a week—she even got the key from my mom so she could work out when nobody was there.

Lisa’s dedication thrilled my mother, who in return was a mentor to her, providing validation and emotional support. So when Lisa asked if she could move into the Swayze house for a couple of weeks, my mom didn’t hesitate at all before saying yes.

Lisa stayed at our house for a couple of weeks, and as it happened, I was home for much of that time. Early on, before my mother really knew Lisa, my mom had told me, “Buddy, I don’t want you dating Lisa. She’s bad news.” But then my mother had watched Lisa transform herself into a serious dancer, and now she had a slightly different message. “Buddy,” she said. “I don’t want you dating Lisa. I don’t want you messing her up.”

My mom didn’t know it, but the attraction between Lisa and me had been growing for some time. She had seemed indifferent to me all those months, but it turned out she was interested in me, too—she was just shy, and acting like she didn’t care was her way of covering it up. But during those two weeks when Lisa stayed with us, she and I took every opportunity to steal time together. When Mom was in the kitchen, we’d be behind the swinging door in the dining room, making out. After everyone in the house had gone to sleep, we’d sneak out to the living room and fool around on the couch. We still
weren’t technically “dating,” but man, we couldn’t get enough of each other.

In fact, I had been seeing other girls—and the very day Lisa came to stay at our house I had a date with a girl named Mimi, which led to an uncomfortable moment. Vicky Edwards, the daughter of Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, had gone out of town and loaned me her Corvette. With such a hot car at my disposal, I’d asked Mimi out for that Saturday night, to go to the Houston Rodeo. But when Lisa moved into our house that afternoon, Mom expected me to give her a ride to the rodeo, too.

The Corvette was a two-seater, of course, so Lisa took the front seat and Mimi squeezed between us, sitting on the tiny console. Mimi was a nice-enough girl, but she was pretty much the embodiment of what Lisa and I had joked about privately— the big-haired, heavily made-up Houston girl. To my embarrassment, Mimi kept tickling my ear and kissing me all the way to the rodeo, as Lisa sat silently. I felt ridiculous and embarrassed, yet even though it was clear to anyone paying attention that Lisa was the only girl I truly cared about impressing, I still didn’t understand what she meant to me.

When my time with Disney on Parade ended, it was time to figure out my next step. After all the rigors of the show, my knee was pretty wrecked, and I looked forward to having some time to heal. But fate intervened when I received a scholarship to study with the Harkness Ballet in New York City.

Touring with Disney on Parade had made me realize how deeply dance was rooted in my soul. Of all the things I loved to
do, nothing came close to the feeling dancing gave me—a feeling of complete emotional and physical freedom, as if your spirit is soaring in all directions at once. It’s hard to capture in words the sheer joy and fulfillment that the act of dancing can bring. All I knew was, I wanted to do it forever. And Harkness was my chance to do it professionally, at the highest level.

My mother, who had pushed me and pushed me as a young dancer, didn’t want me to accept the scholarship. She knew that ballet dancing is just about the hardest thing you can put a knee joint through, and a company like Harkness was guaranteed to push me to my absolute limit. My mother didn’t want to see me go through that—but also, true to form, she didn’t want me to attempt something that she felt I couldn’t be the best at.

Of course, if there’s one sure way to get Patrick Swayze to do something, it’s to tell me I can’t do it. You don’t think I can dance with one of the greatest professional ballet companies in the world? Watch me.

So I packed up a couple of suitcases and got ready for the move to New York. This was it—Buddy Swayze was heading for the bright lights and the big city! I was excited at the chance to test my stuff against the best dancers in the business. And I knew exactly whom I wanted to spend my last evening in Houston with: Lisa.

I invited her to dinner at St. Michel’s, a fancy French restaurant in town. We ate escargot and talked for what must have been hours. Lisa and I had gotten more and more comfortable with each other, and we talked easily about dancing, life, and the future that stretched enticingly ahead of us. At the end of dinner, she gave me a fifty-cent piece. “This is for luck,”
she said, pressing it into my hand. In return, I gave her a broken Mickey Mouse watch I’d gotten during Disney on Parade.

I didn’t realize yet that I was falling in love with Lisa, but I did know she was the kind of person I always wanted to have in my life. I gave her a card that night that she’s kept all these years. It gives a pretty good idea of how I was feeling about her:

Lisa, I really can’t tell you how much you’ve come to mean to me in such a short time, as a friend, and as someone I could really care for. Remember the happiness we shared and I hope in your mind you know that I don’t want what we shared to end! I’ll miss you very much and will think of you often. Work hard at your dancing and I’ll do the same, and maybe, someday …! My heart be united with yours, Buddy

It was a magical night—or at least, it was until I dropped Lisa off at her house and was driving home. As I was making my way through the suburb of Bellaire, I looked in my rear-view mirror to see police lights flashing. My stomach fell. Earlier that day, I’d realized the license plates on my car were out of date, so I’d taken the plates off my dad’s truck and put them on my car. The police were pulling me over because they’d run a check and discovered the plates were on the wrong vehicle.