Roxy Music

I was about to do what few people have done, I was entering my fourth year at the Interlochen Arts Academy. Most students (wisely) come for their junior and/or senior years only, so they can graduate from there and beef up their resume for their college of choice. Besides, 14 is a bit tender to be living away from home, but by 16, you generally can’t get out of the door fast enough. Having been a four-year student (although only two in the dorms), I was set to rule the school. I was entering the highest level of dance class, and I was more comfortable and confident in my world than I ever was before or since (with the possible exception of sixth grade and my last year at Hampshire College – I usually get it just as it’s over).

Early in the year, I went to the Saturday night movie with my shadow Eric and another dancer, the distractingly beautiful Eva. The three of us had become inseparable early that year and we did everything we could together. That night’s film was Fame, a musical about the High School of Performing Arts in NYC, but it might as well have been about Interlochen. The film is divided roughly into four sections, one for each high school year. When the Freshman Year title came up, there was a weak smattering of applause and a couple of self-conscious cheers from the babies in attendance that night. As each year’s title came up, that group would shout it out, and by the time senior year hit, there was a deafening roar for many minutes. Although a seriously flawed film (with some horrendous music), we all felt close to it because our situations were so similar. So everybody rocketed out of the movie singing or spinning pirouettes and generally feeling pretty goddamned special.

The next week, I had something I needed to do one night and so Eric and Eva went off to the beach together to smoke cigarettes and whatnot. I had grave misgivings about this. I was a senior, I had good friends in a good community, I was dancing all day long and getting roles in virtually all the pieces being performed, I was a strong academic student as well and was succeeding on all fronts. But one. I didn’t have a girlfriend. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t have any friends that were girls. Being a dancer, I had plenty – and they were all the most beautiful girls on campus. But I can’t tell you the number of times I spent the evening having an intense heart-to-heart with one of them to have them give me a chaste hug when we were done and say, “you’re such a good friend – just like a brother”, or the number of times I helped put one of them back together after their asshole boyfriend broke them apart and getting that same hug with “I wish my boyfriend was as nice as you” Well, he would be if you dated ME, you beautiful idiot. It was all made even more frustrating by the fact that Eric, my roommate and best friend ever, was irritatingly gorgeous. Strong physique, meaty arms and chest, and the kind of chiseled face that regularly shows up in GQ (he would make an appearance as a model on those very pages a few years later), Eric had the looks that girls (and certain guys) craved. Although I loved him like no other, I soon grew tired of beautiful girls coming up to me out of the blue and starting up a conversation which quickly turned into, “so what’s Eric really like?”.

“Oh, he’s a big jerk, and he’s gay too.”

So when Eva and Eric set off in the dark for the beach, I knew deep down that it was all over. But I pretended not to. The next night, Eva came over for Open Room (you were allowed to have somebody of the opposite sex in your room for 45 minutes a night as long as the door was open and you had three feet on the floor at all times (which led to people either fucking on the floor, or throwing a yardstick down on the carpeting and jumping into bed)). I sat on my bed reading my homework while Eva gave Eric a backrub. I tried to engross myself in my book, but soon noticed Eric’s hand fluttering discretely towards me, waving up and down. Figuring that he wanted me to turn my light off (denial dies a hard death), I switched off my light and strained to make out the words on the page to the dim glow of Eric’s 15-watt red light bulb, dangling in a paper lantern over his bed. Before long, I heard this strange soft slurpy smacking sound, and I glanced up from my dark book to see the two of them making out on his bed. Feeling humiliated, jealous, and stupid, I quietly closed my book and crept out of the room and (almost) closed the door and slunk down into the lobby of the dorm, where I found my friend Bob, who had similarly been banished from his room down the hall.

The next morning was a flexible class day (Thursday), and both Eric and Eva were free until that afternoon’s dance class, so he snuck her into the room. We were listening to something loud and noisy when she showed up (The Flying Lizards or some such), and Eric, who had moments before been rocking and nodding along with the music, suddenly declared it too loud to start the day, and he ripped the record off the player and put on Roxy Music’s Flesh + Blood. I left the two lovebirds alone and walked the halls until lunch time, scoffing at Eric’s duplicity. Oh sure, that music’s fine until she shows up and then he puts on some wussy, new-agey crap. Puh-leese.

Eric and Eva dated for a couple of months that fall, and I took it like a man. I also started hanging out with Tina and her best friend Robin. Both dancers, Robin was crazy, but I really liked Tina (okay, she was crazy too). A lithe blonde with the most well-developed sense of cynicism I had run across in someone our age, Tina was gentle and beautiful and funny and had an intriguing mix of delicate ingenuous innocence and hard-boiled dark-as-night world weariness that captivated me. Plus, she really liked a lot of incredibly cool musicians like Ultravox and Madness and Brian Eno and Visage and, her favorite, Lene Lovich. How could I resist?

Easy. I’m a coward.

Soon, it became clear to everybody but us that we both really liked each other, so Kathy, the only other four-year dancer, threw us a hook-up party the night before Christmas break. The hook-up party had a long and honored tradition, in which two people who really liked each other but were afraid to admit it were invited to a party by some of their impatient friends, who got them drunk and left them alone to give nature a helping hand. Of course, like any subject of one of these parties, I had no idea that’s what was going on, so I just showed up to the girl’s locker room at the appointed time (being a male dancer got you into all sorts of highly restricted areas that the other guys could only dream about) and cheerfully drank my rum and laughed and chatted with everybody. And then stupidly wondered later where everybody else but Tina had gone. We made our way upstairs to the main dance studio and giddily and drunkenly danced our way through Opus 26, a piece my mom had choreographed for Eric and me and Tina and Jill (my first serious crush, who graduated the year before). It was really just a pretense to get our hands on each other, as it consisted largely of intricate partnering (and highly suggestive partnering at that – at the last minute, my mom took out the part where the women did the splits on our faces, which is too bad because that particular move was going to need lots of rehearsal) and it worked well for that. Although nothing more than a couple of hugs was exchanged that night, we both knew we had silently stepped over some invisible threshold. It was like building a house of cards, both of us holding our breath for fear of knocking down the delicate structure.

And the next day, she went home for the three-week Christmas vacation and the cards collapsed.