Royce

“You’d have been so proud of me,” he told me, sitting on his favorite section of the contertop in the kitchen.

“Okay Royce what did you do this time?” I asked him.

“Nothing. I sat around all day today,” he said. With his fork, he mixed the vegetables in the plastic tupperware container courtesy of the Chinese restaurant down the street.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“I mean it. I really didn’t do anything. I didn’t take class…I didn’t leave the house.”

“No sit-ups, no stretching? No floor barre, no regular barre?”

He couldn’t fool me. I had walked into the house several times at 1:00 a.m. to see my dear roommate disheveled, sweaty, weights on his ankles to give him resistance for what I knew was a rigorously twisted ballet regimen. He would turn the living room into a training ground for iron ballet, as if they had made this an Olympic sport.

“Nothing,” he promised. He ate another forkful of vegetable medley. This is what I called his standard meal – string beans, white beans, black beans, maybe brocolli, and perhaps one more something that came out of a can, all mixed together in tupperware.

“Don’t you ever worry about ptomaine poisoning?” I asked him, eyeing his concoction.

“What?”

“Nevermind.” I knew he knew what it was but he was going to make me work to make the point and I wasn’t bout it. Besides, we both knew Royce didn't ever cook food; if he couldn't microwave it, he didn't need it. “Back to the matter at hand, if you’re telling the truth then I am very proud of you.”

He sighed deeply. “Is this what age does to you? We’re getting old. Maybe that’s what happens, you just loose the need to do all of that extra shit.”

“No, I lost my urge long before I hit twenty-five. You’ve been going to the gym for you and me for a while.”

“I feel guilty,” he said.

“As if you cheated on your career huh?”

His eyes got bright and wide with excitement that I understood. “Yes! Yes, that’s right!”

“Do you understand you’re hilarious?”

He must have because he almost fell of the countertop, laughing.

I went into the refrigerator to grab the fruit punch. The container had no weight. I shook it and looked at Royce.

“Um?”

“There’s another one in there,” he said.

“I see that,” I said. “I’m confused about why there’s only a swallow left in the container. Didn’t you see Harlem Nights? Why would any fool put a container back in the refrigerator with-
“There’s a half a cup of juice up in that container,” he said, the twang seeping out of the country and into my apartment. “You better drink all that juice. Don’t waste that swallow.”

It would have been sage advice coming from someone who didn’t regularly finish juice, leftovers, butter, only to return their empty containers to the refrigerator. And he knew it.

“I’m going to shoot you in your big toe,” I told him.

We laughed hearty.

Independent

The traveling is much more difficult when you have to arrange it. Two weeks, three gigs, three job descriptions. Oh and the wedding. Friday 7/22 NY to LA for a wedding. Sunday 7/24 LA to Santa Fe for Complexions (dancer gig). Wednesdy bus ride with Complexions to Aspen for more airless torture (altitude) on stage. Sunday 7/31 Aspen to Denver to home in NY.

To re-pack and leave 8/1 to Chicago for a convention I committed last year to teach in. Let me insert in here a headache right quick: the convention people allowed me to purchase my own ticket and agreed to reimburse me later because they understood that I needed this option. I had already booked the ticket to go straight from Aspen to Chicago thinking that I'd have some time after the teaching gig to sit in New York, veg, pack and prepare for the two month stint in LA. But when Donald Byrd asked me to please be rehearsal director during that week of anticipated down time, I dumbly agreed and had to call the airlines to find out if they would change the ticket to go from NY to Chicago, at which point I reverted back to flying home with Complexions on the already-purchased ticket - so that I could have time to pack for two months of course. D'you get your headache yet? Okay where was I... Wednesday 8/3 to Seattle to direct rehearsals for Donald. Saturday to Los Angeles to start the LA Opera gig.

This is the kind of madness one has to coordinate as an independent contractor. I'm not going to even get into contract dramas with Broadway and agency conversations to plot ways of working two jobs on opposite coasts at the same time. All up and through those two weeks.

But right now I'm in Cincinnati because I happily accepted an invitation to dance in the Gala of International Ballet Stars. It's been a dream of mine since college to dance on one of these lofty programs, replete with twenty or so principals with various ballet companies all over the world. They usually come in and do the big pas de deuxs (duets) of classical ballets like Don Quixote, Le Corsaire, Romeo and Juliet. They usually make absurd amounts of money. The draw is that ballet audiences can see several of them instead of sitting through an entire ballet for the showstoppers. My friends at SMU sat with me drinking haterade by the gallon between our uproarious applause; "I can do that! They need to be paying me a couple grand a night..." Yeah right.

And now here I am in one, and in good company. Stuttgart Ballet, Spanish National, American Ballet Theater, Royal Ballet, English National Ballet and Dance Theater of Harlem are represented with principals. It was phenomenal. I represented Complexions.

So though I had to deal with the drama of packing my own silks (a la Farewell Tour), arranging two costumes, neither of which I had all the parts of in Los Angeles, choreographing on the plane and between dreams the silk solo that would be a world premiere, and getting my hair braided at the nth hour so that it would fit beneath the baseball cap I wear in the other solo, the check was worth it (I've never been paid this much for one night of work).

The performances weren't perfect. But at least I didn't fall out of the air...

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He is hilarious, the almost-dead man on the pavement. The body is slumped, pressed into the imperfect folds of the curb like cartoon chaser villains who get flattened in exaggeration against whatever ruined them that episode. Only this is funnier. Even the blatant bigness of the man’s eyes full of something other than death.

The other pair of eyes, clear as water and looking at the barely breathing, almost-dead man, belongs to a youngster too old to be excited by animated cat and mouse or zany moving pictures. He has seen much more by now in this rule-free place, shootings, knife-fights, police brutality, needles shoved up the slaughtered thirsty veins of junkies, these things before high school. Four years there to really understand them. A summer thereafter for media to abduct his imagination and show him worse.

But he had never been the cause of death.

And I guess he wouldn’t be for at least a few whole minutes, which might still be long-winded and torturous soliloquies passing with leisure like happy nymphs. He is scared there beneath the burgundy adding character to an otherwise bleak sky, mistletoe over the late steppers-out waiting for the sober night to kiss them because of course it is the swelter of memories hovering in the intersection, mingling with his own recollection of what just occurred, that really inebriates the moment. His button features look orange because of the burgundy. He cannot find and seek refuge on the terms for this death because he doesn’t know them and he is too shocked to find comfort when a few brothers beneath the bright awning of Crown Chicken ask,

“Are you alright man?”

and

“Yo, son how did that happen?”

Because where he and the almost dead man are, catty corner from the chicken grease and in the loneliest part of the intersection, it is too dark for anybody, including the frozen young man, to see.

It’s funny, beautifully so, trust me on this one, really. It’s almost as funny as my trying not to bellow too much from laughing since my doing so might shift things around too much and people have tried, yes they have tried my stomach too many times over the whiles.
It’s not as noisy right now at midnight without the conversation of too-knowledgeable children commanding their ways home with more authority than the buses whose opening and closing doors offer their daily industrial swish to the normal cacophony. No, this intersection is quieter now, an odd Psalm set to music metered by the slow steps of men who work when they feel like it, hustle always. Between cars whizzing by and an occasional arriver from the Franklin subway station turning the bars around to exit, one could almost hear droplets of water cayenne from bits of rust resting on their bottoms fall from scaffolding too old to remember facelift plans for the Atlantic Avenue buildings they skirt. Or maybe I’m the only one who can hear it.

No, no. The young man can hear it too because he is so overwhelmed, the poor thing and it’s hilarious because the panic producing this heightened sensitivity is so unnecessary. If only he knew, but then how could he without a heap of wisdom and a dash of omniscience?

What the man cannot hear are whispers of folks who have slowly begun to gather at the corner, across from Crown Chicken at the apex of the delta these three corners form. Only silence on the fourth because the rats are quiet as they scurry, try to consume the cold, spilled coffee too strong for their taste. Anyway, the conversation brewing is still mute to his ears.

“My goodness look at that, is he alive?”

“Who knows, none of my business.”

“On a Friday night at that.”

“Lord me glad me didn’t make it here in time to see it.”

“I don’t see no blood.”

“I don’t see nothing.”

“Could be a bum.”

Absolute comedy. Because even this woman knows beneath her parka and Kangol that bums have better sense, and that the few in the area carefully concealed in the plentiful hiding space offered by the formerly vacant nooks between storefronts would never pass out on the street. Even in Brooklyn the homeless are covered in dirt the color of gum forever enshrined in the sidewalks where they sleep. This woman doesn’t really care about the nearly dead man as much as discussing him.

A spoken word artist with natural globs of hair sprouting from his busy mind walks toward the scene and stops at its periphery. He is robust and the words float out on the high from his live joint, minus smoke.

“The universe is doing a stunt right now, performing. I hope you people have open ears because this event, this transgression, this impression is much bigger than us.”

Oh whatever happened to blame management? It tickles me, though. And he’s right about the size of it but since people here at Franklin and Fulton are concerned with passing by or moving side to side for answers to their pressing questions about the horizontal man the sentiment dwindles to cliché like a fading lightning bolt.

The youngster is still worried, needlessly, and I chuckle.

When the police arrive, the silence is close to gone, the man on the curb closer. But the pavement underneath him is quite alive with the reverb of the subway when it comes by, resonant despite the layers of structure above it, stacked like leather over the sweaters over the camisoles over the underwear over life-fortified ribs that had interest in (and nothing else) expanding to take in enough breath to move their owners faster from the drama of “law enforcement.” Others who have nothing better to do stay and watch as the soul leaves the dead man, carefully, the way an eighteen-wheeler backs out of a service station. There is enough astonishment left on his contorted visage, the whites of his eyes rice-like as they crumble into the fright of the young man’s paralysis.

In fact, his lack of movement takes on a different ilk as supple muscles beneath dark eyebrows let go. He succumbs to the absence of thought and simply feels the ground beneath him. For a moment, he is rescued by a flicker from somewhere that everything will be okay.

“I think that brother standing over there might know what happened,” someone shouts.

The youngster shifts his weight from the spot on the ground that haunted him with dangerous hopes, realizes it is past time to rush in and act on his natural human concern. His alertness renovated, he checks the body for a pulse. He looks for signs of blood. He places his head on the torso bowed by the edge of the curb and listens for a heartbeat because he does know what happened. Uncertainly, like furniture loose on the deck of a ship through rough current, his mind dribbles around, shuffling through his rampant cache of information to remember what to do.

A few people help, or try.

“Is he still breathing?”

“Need to put something around to keep traffic away.”

“Don’t move him, in case something is broken.”

Mostly they stare at the scene, aware they can do nothing really but wonder and maybe pray, their expressions glued silly as if to a billboard featuring stunning models. I know the reasons and I tingle. I’ve seen many deaths, and this one is just as meaningful. Not like the death of a loved president or the bulldozing of buildings, or of relatives or of innocence. Very different in fact from the pilfering of freedom or the loud, sudden crackle of leaves that scream when the season has passed, or the soft pulverization of the ebbing soul when its shell is battered by misguided fists somewhere between dinners and daylights. But just as meaningful, yes, for its effect.

Autumn but the night is way too cold and lattice scarves, soft beanies, and sturdy jeans contain the warmth; no one has extra to part with and every breath God gives feels like winter. Fine though. The intersection will generate more heat now that the crowd is growing and shrinking, the people stirring and bumping into each other like atoms, swaying, standing still, walking still but going nowhere all. Except for a handful, maybe nine, who agree with the youngster’s brief reckoning that the matter of the almost dead man will take care of itself.

Yes, yes there is a story for sure about how he got there. There is a story miles wide with streams of people who learn to manage their tongues and the actions that follow and move forward, you know? Well, some of them anyway. We’ll get there. But stories, like lives, takes time…