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The Mostly Unfabulous Homepage of Ethan Green
The Sex Squad
From "Sixteenth Street"
Our apartment. It seems impossible to think of now: four rooms for twenty-five dollars a month. The address was 248 West Sixteenth Street. One of a short row of ruined store-fronted tenements on a street with some cared-for buildings but largely pretty ruined itself. It was mostly Hispanic. I think I could safely say it was the worst block in Chelsea. Our neighborhood was called Chelsea. To this day, Chelsea has resisted being upgraded to the level of its name.
Our street even had the worst whore. Other streets had slim, tight-assed Hispanic girls. Girls with a certain tautness and chic, something like racehorses jockeying for position at the post. But our whore was fat, slovenly, and not even Hispanic. She used to stand with one foot on our lower step, her elbow leaning on the iron stair-railing, watching the short dark men who walked by. Occasionally, she threw back a wave of greasy unwashed hair. A large rhinestone bracelet was her only gesture towards beautification. She turned her back on our building. There was no business there. Too poor.
They all said it, our dancer friends who came to visit. "Your whore, she's really bad." We were ashamed and longed to have one of those flighty little Spanish fillies patrolling our block. But no such luck. The best we could do was Tony Perkins out cruising once in a while.
Our building was filthy. Garbage was strewn in the halls. Urine stained the stairs and its smell floated in the air. Children ran down the stairs peeing. The contest, it seemed, was to see who, starting from the top floor, could reach the front door without running out of urine.
All three of us carried a candle and matches in our dance bags, as the lights were often out when we got home and the stairways were pitch black. We were more afraid of stumbling than being mugged, though muggings weren't out of the question. Breaking and entering was more the style of our building, and it was usually our neighbors who broke and entered each other. Why wander far from home when it's all right here under your nose? To put it mildly.
Later we also took to carrying a brick in our dance bags, too -- to fend off unwanted advances as we came down the street. It was some neighborhood.
The apartment itself? Someone we met at a rental agency put us onto it. Belle-Mere hesitated in front of the building; the worn stone, the light scattering of lettuce leaves, cigarette wrappers, and scraps of paper down the steps and onto the street daunted her, I suppose. The windows looked as if people had spit on them to clean them. "Twenty-five dollars a month," she said. We went in and up to the third-floor front on the right. We opened the door with the key the agency had given us.
It was a railroad flat. The first room was the kitchen. It had a small iron cook stove. A bathtub with an enameled lid in two liftable sections. A sink. Built-in cupboards, and two straight-backed wooden chairs. It was the sort of place where Little Annie Rooney would have lived when she was down on her luck and on the run from Mrs. Meanie.
The next room was smaller, with a small mirror hanging on the wall by the window. (I still have that mirror.) There was a second small room with a window on the air shaft and then a rather large front room.
"We could make this into a kind of practice room," Belle-Mere said.
"And then we wouldn't have to furnish it," Levoy said, looking out the window.
There was a fireplace on the wall that had been sealed up with a small gas heater in front of it. It never worked, though we often tried it.
"There's no toilet," I said.
"It's in the hall, I think. For everyone to use," Belle-Mere said.
She sounded so hesitant I had to say, "This is fun. It's like going back in time."
So we took it. We painted it all white and furnished it from the Salvation Army. It was our home.
One little room in the middle was Belle-Mere's, with a single bed in it. We bought a cheap printed Indian throw for the bed. With a little end table and a lamp, both painted black. It was our sitting room, too.
In the next little room, we had a double Salvation Army bed where Levoy and I slept. Our sex life was definitely over, so I didn't have to worry that Belle-Mere would wake in the night to slurping sounds.
We put up a dance barre across the front wall in the big room, crossing the windows. We rarely used it except to hang wet dance clothes on it. That room was always too cold to be used in the winter, and in warmer weather, our Puerto Rican neighbors had frantic, noisy dancing parties that penetrated the room so it was uninhabitable. There was no rest or relief in that room, but having it empty and luminous at the end of the other rooms kept us from feeling confined.
The odor of that building was unique, quite separate from the urine smells in the hallways. From the endless cooking in our neighbors' kitchens there was a sweetish, sour, sickening kind of smell. A smell of cooking vegetables, but I never knew which vegetables. Some mixture of the small, tortured tubers I saw outside the Puerto Rican stores in the neighborhood. Maybe with a bit of goat mixed in. Like body odor. Or dried vomit. Perhaps there was dried vomit in the halls that mixed with it. Does it sound disgusting? It was, but it didn't really disgust me.
It didn't disgust any of us. We were focused on our dance careers. We were soon off to Saint Subber's Lambertville Music Tent anyway and a summer much like the previous one.
The auditions were easy. Zachary Solov's choreography was a step forward from our season in Chicago and Milwaukee, but show business is show business: kick, step, twirl, smile. I saw Sally Ann point me out to Mr. Solov. He had curly hair, a turned-up nose, and a big grin. That merry Russian look. He tried to be a temperamental star but he was really just a good egg.
Belle-Mere was sent way up Eighth Avenue somewhere to help the costumers with fittings. Everything that could be was rented from Brooks Costumes. (I didn't even know there was a Brooks Brothers, so I never confused the two.) A lot of new costumes were being made for The King and I, which had been added to the repertoire at the last minute, since all the good costumes had already been rented out. I suppose all summer stock is the same thing. First, all the other male dancers check you out, to see if you're fuckable or competition. The ones in the mood sleep with each other and get it out of the way early in the season. Then the singers make their moves. And the stars pass through, picking and choosing bed partners here and there, like a quick shopping trip to the supermarket: "Oh, this looks good and this and this Let's get the hell out of here." And male and female, they'd be gone to another summer theater and another company.
Then there were the shoals of people in the company management and from the audiences and from the neighborhood of country homes in Bucks County and New Jersey that surrounded the theater. The dancers were something like a party of pioneers crossing the country while the Indians raided them. Except our Promised Land was autumn, when the season would be over.
When you're seventeen,
I guess your self-concept is that you are supposed to capture someone
else's fancy. At least when you are a seventeen-year-old male dancer.
It never occurred to me to select someone for myself. Levoy had selected
me, and now I had deselected myself. Levoy did have good manners. He didn't
try to crawl over me in the night.
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Copyright © 1998 David Leddick.
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