Jesse
The house lights dimmed. The audience settled back into place. In the darknesss I remembered what I had said to Rodney: “Things will be different now between us. I know these aren’t your steps. These are Metro’s steps. This dance is for him. You are Rodney, black and lovely. I am Jesse. Let’s be that to one another. It’s already quite a lot.” Rodney smiled and turned down the lights. I kissed his darkness and our dance went back and forth, step-leap-and-down. We danced to quiet music and to the applause of our own skin. There were no splinters in his coarse hair or in mine.
A murmur lifted from the stage. The curtain drew up like a big woman gathering her skirts. From my post in the wings, I imagined the first glimmer of light on the dark stage as a beacon from somewhere high revealing a room with an immense fourth wall. From the light came a sudden darkness, then blue, and two fluttering bodies in a dance.
The dancers moved and my body moved with them. Suddenly Metro came alive between the steps: freight train, caroom-boom-clack. Their sweat glistening was my sweat streaming out. Their muscles in a voice of trains moved with mine. And his, and his, my underground man.
I climbed the warehouse stairs two at a time. I was dressed as Metro would want. Two poppers waited inside my pocket. Our tickets to another time, another room.
“Jesse? Jesse? That you?”
It was early afternoon. The river smelled ripe and blue. The wood of the warehouse floor was soft and slimy on my feet. Nothing here except the shadows and the orange glow of cigarettes here, there, over there. Metro approached unsteadily, his eyes half-open, his underwear sagging from the waist. The smell of medicine seeped from him. River water gurgled and popped from the distant, swaying piles.
Male hands on a male waist. Wheels of legs spinning, leaping. Tiny runs ending in arabesque. Turn-two-three, plié-two-three. Relevé. Arms circling overhead. A reach for air. The bodies swallowed, one into the other.
I held him by the shoulders. No hug, no caress. I simply held him. He knelt on his own. His eyes commanded me. “Push harder,” he said. “Push.” His head hung lazily to one side. “My head aches. Maybe I’ve taken too many pills.”
“We can try it another way, baby.” My voice pleaded with him. I didn’t know what to do.
“I need it now. Give me your hands.” And he covered his face with my hands, breathing them in.
A second round of rapid runs in a circle of one man’s pain. Trains on distant tracks from the music. Hands from one dancer holding the other, lifting and drawing me nearer. In watching them, I was dancing, too, dancing until sweat covered the floor like a cascade of tears now glowing in swirls of radiant, colored stagelights. Then feet reaching for the ground.
Splinters. Watch out for the splinters.
Once he had shaken the tobacco-stained hands of a sharecropper’s boy, the son of his mother’s maid. And he rode all the way home smelling his hand and knowing how hungry he suddenly was for the rough love they held. The first night we spent together, all he wanted to do was sleep with his nose pressed to the part in my hair. He said my smell came from the soil.
The lights faded from blue to orange. The dancers gained shadow and space. Each threw a bit of his body into the light, captured color and grace from the bare stage.
He fumbled at my jeans. His fingers couldn’t hold. “Just take me,” he whined. “Give me what you are.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Metro.” He was shaking in my arms.
“I won’t call you nigger ever again. I’ll be your nigger. I’m not a white motherfucker. I’m not.”
“Who called you that?”
“They did. Out there. In here. What’s the difference?”
“Talk sense, Metro. What’s gotten into you?”
“I’m not Metro anymore. I’m Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima.”
“And what does that make me, huh? Another nigger, huh.” And before I realized it I was shaking him, slapping him, knocking him about the head. He started to cry. I felt his mouth curl up, the tears cascade. I licked them dry. I held him in my arms. “You don’t need it like this, baby. Not like this.”
Then saxophone. A flurry of trumpets. Staccato piano. The A-train stride. Arms vibrating, legs twisting. Torsos lean. Feet firm on the ground. Hips whirling in a storm. Floorwork. Wideman extension. Arms reaching up-two-three, curve-two-three, down.
“Hold me,” he said, pressing my hands to his chest, making me feel him all over. “Hold me here,” he said, guiding my fingers to his throat. “Keep holding. Tight. Tighter. Tighter.” His voice was a strained whisper. Air rushed out of him.
Palms flat, knees bent in geometry. Arabesque. The dancer ran and leapt and landed in the waiting arms of the other. My muscles panted loudly with the dancers, my spine arched up and wide. “Touch me. Hold me,” my body said from the distance.
“Get your clothes on. I’m taking you out of here.”
“Yes, Jesse.”
“You all right, now?”
“Yes, I’m better now.”
“You go first. Watch your step. Take my hand.”
Outside, the air stung me. Blades of sunlight fell from the sky. Metro led me out of the dark, rotting warehouse. I missed a step and stumbled against him. He reached to block my fall. I held tight.
The fourth wall broke open into a gathering wave of hands clapping. Pools of sweat dotted the stage. The applause showered over me. The dancers stood proud, erect. Then quickly, the fourth wall burst into light, and the room holding us there vanished.