The Teacher

The Teacher

I met Sally in a dance class in New York City. At first we seldom spoke to each other, I was so focused on getting my steps and the technique right at the eyes of this instructor who sat there shouting comments at us all and with so much reputation behind her, I wanted to get this one thing right. Sally was cute, full of sparkle, long mane of bright hair, so sunny Sally, blonde bordering on redhead. And she didn’t give a shit, but in a nice way, she was always laughing and giggling and she had a life of her own, unlike me, always struggling and warding off the eyes of prejudice. I never felt really welcome and a lot of these dancers were just so rude.

Sally had decided to go out with me after much insistence. We exchanged telephones and she picked me up in her beat up old car. Her boyfriend was a bum she told me. I met him briefly when we went to pick up the materials for the party she had, to work at a gig as a burlesque go-go. I was just happy to follow along because I didn’t have anything going on, having just arrived to the city.

Don’t let her break you! Don’t let her take everything away from you! Sally screamed at me jokingly across the dance floor, while the teacher made well intended adjustments, the good intention concealing a congealed and crystalized cynicism for life and her unconscious tendency to demean “anyone” who, as she put it, “challenged the instructor. “this is my class!”.

I never saw Sally again. That night at the burlesque show she told me to take care while I grabbed her stuff and helped her on her way to the car. Her props did not work and she had to go off stage and come back again for a second time to perform the same routine again, and then her fire cracker breast pyrotecnics did work. The crowd was entranced. Her breast weren’t huge, they were a size B, with glowing pink nipples.

I for my own part, kept going to class religiously. Whether it rained or snowed it didn’t matter. It was enough to get me out of the house where my roommates would be doing all sorts of illegitimate activities that I never saw. Except for the one time when there was dark petrol coming out of the crack of the bathroom door and I had to knock.

It was an “art” experiment, they told me after I knocked, the door slightly opened, so I could only see one tenth of my roommate’s face peaking out towards me, I could just see one eye and some of his nose through the slight opening and could hear the voices of two or three other people who were inside giggling along the sound of the faucet running.

Twenty something dollars a class, plus the train fare, plus breakfast, and I was happy to be in the class. Every single day. No one could move me from that class. I was all work and no play so I was becoming a dull boy. All my money went to that class, and then sometimes I would buy a drink or too and that was it. I had hope.

Sally was like me. She had built a habit of doing things to base her self esteem on her own self rather than on what other people thought of her. She was centered and grounded in a life that did not shake nor waver with the influence of other people’s opinions. The problem was, that although it did work for Sally, it didn’t work for me. I grew more and more isolated, and people took me for a snob, whereas she just became more popular and got more gigs.

Sally had escaped the class, and I never saw her come back.

I started to slowly become like the others. I started losing the technique I had learned in College, becoming too lose, and although I became more and more relaxed and self assured, the reasons I was self-assured about vanished, and instead, I became more like The Teacher, without realizing it.

One day, The Teacher invited us over for a tour downtown, where the bull was. We all went. It was after class, and there was a student with a baby and and older woman who had been following the teacher since she was little. We took a picture together in front of the bull, I took the picture so you couldn’t see me in it, but I was there. The teacher said “I never spit, specially in public, but this is a good time to” and then spat at the bull, and all the women laughed.

It took years for me to disentangle myself from the teacher. After all, no other Teacher would take me and lavish me with so much attention. I played along with the game Master and Servant just so I could soak in as much as I could. To many other people I was a hopeless case but The Teacher could see my potential and downplayed it so the other dancer wouldn’t become jealous. They were all great, don’t get me wrong. But not all of them were real dancers, with spirit, you know? In that class I learned a lot and I knew I had to be there. Although I was constantly put below my own potential for reasons I can only begin to grasp, and think bordered on the political.

The teacher didn’t move at all during class, just sat there, making jokes and being witty and talking to the musicians when we had them, or playing music on the soundbox when there wasn’t one. The mirrors were old and I could barely see my face reflected on them.

One night I woke up suffocating, full of sweat and unable to breathe. I had dreamt that a bull was sitting on my chest in the middle of a plaza somewhere in a Mediterranean town. It licked my face like a dog and then sat on top of my chest while I laid down on the sand at night.

I went to the hospital and they said nothing was wrong with me and gave me some placebo pills. “Take it easy, you are still young”.

We were doing snow angel stretches on the floor, as we were being cued to close our eyes, I felt the pressure on my shoulders. The substitute teacher stepped both of her feet on my shoulders and said out loud “this is the feeling your character is portraying, dance like this.”

The substitute teacher said: “I feel her spirit now, she is here”. I couldn’t take her seriously, although I did feel a lot more charged that day, and on full power mode, as if I was in a real performance. She was referring to the spirit of the Ballerina who founded the school. But my Teacher didn’t like this substitute, and I was afraid that if I’d like her too, I’d forget my steps when she came back to class.

The last day I saw Sally, we had to evacuate the building, they were throwing rocks at our window to break them in order to release the smoke trapped inside of the room and coming from next door. The walls and ceilings of the studio had filtrations from the pipes which were about a hundred years old or so, so the dance floor was soaking. We walked down the ten floors.

I had grown so used to The Teacher anticipating my mistakes and had become accustomed to performing according to the level that they ascribed me to. Any attempt to do better was read like a rebellion and a challenge to authority that could see me out of class. My motivation to dance was eroding and instead I decided to focus on my pelvic tension.

I saw the Teacher once again, on my way back home from the physical therapist. Talking to a Spanish woman about something that seemed imminent, I only picked up the words “absolutely, must and relax”. On my way out from the store, I came face to face with the Teacher, our eyes locked and I froze. The Teacher did not move for a second and stayed there, pretending not to know me. Like a psychologist avoiding a patient at a store. Super ridiculous. I said excuse me, picked up my belongings and darted out in long struts to the rhythm of a pop record beat on my headphones. I got into my car and did not turn back, in case I would turn into a salt statue.

As I started the car, I did catch a glimpse of The Teacher through the rearview mirror. The Teacher was still there, at the same spot, not moving, unflinching, paralyzed, like a monument.