Buckskin Cocaine Page 7

  After dinner everyone was pretty drunk and in a really good mood and no one wanted to end the party so I suggested we go to this bar that I went to all the time with Robert and George. Well, at least, I usually saw them there and then hung out with them, which is pretty much the same thing. I was sure they’d be there, which would be awesome because then I could rub it in their stupid faces that I was with really important people, like I’d been texting.

  Walking down the street we were loud, and the streets were loud with directors and it seemed like everyone was drunk, and everyone was important. I was even sure at one point that I saw Winona Ryder. Supposedly, she loves Indians. I wondered for a moment if I would become so famous that Winona Ryder would want to have sex with me. I shook my head and laughed at myself, but in the back of my mind I knew that if this day was any indication of the future, that could happen.

  We walked down the steep steps into The Underground. It was wild with music, the deep, damp, smell of beer rising up to meet us as we descended. I waded through an ocean of dark hair, Robert and George appearing nearly the minute I started to make my way to the bar. I nodded at them and though they acted like they barely noticed me, I was sure they were jealous. I figured I’d be big about it all and buy them some drinks. Hell, why not, they were soon going to be begging me for attention. And they were always poor.

  After telling the crew that I had some people I had to talk with, I walked up to the bar and bought a round of Patrón and started to bring the drinks over to Robert and George and stopped. There was that goddamn Indian ballet dancer I’d almost hooked up with a while back. She was having some sort of argument with another girl and Robert and George were just standing there looking stupid. I could hear George say something like, “Cool it girls,” and the ballet dancer walked off. I went over to them and said, “Glad she didn’t see me,” and nodded towards the dancer. “Why’s that, Wish?” George said, sounding testy. He was watching her go. “She’s crazy. I’m sure if she’d have seen me I wouldn’t have been able to get away from her,” I said. And George just took both shots of Patrón from my hands and gulped them down, one after another. “But that other one is for…” I said, and Robert clapped me on the back, the silver bracelet around his wrist making it sting. “It’s OK Wish,” he said, pulling me away from George, which made me feel anxious. I looked at the dancer. She was at the bar with that crazy Pueblo bitch Lucy, who was talking at the dancer like her mouth was some kind of machine gun, the dancer nodding and obviously looking around for a chance to escape. I hoped she would stay over there. I could see the girl who’d been arguing with the dancer yelling at George, who was nodding and sipping at a drink that had seemed to appear in his hands spontaneously after Robert had pulled me away. The girl was really young. And she looked totally fucked up. But she was hot. She looked sort of like my Laura. Navajo for sure. Then she was gesturing wildly at George who was staring blankly at her, and then over at the dancer. She started pulling George towards the exit and he had to violently push her hands off of him. I thought this would make her mad, and she’d storm off but instead she started stroking his chubby brown arm. Then she laughed and walked off towards the bar presumably to get another drink. Robert sighed and followed her.

  “Why are the hot ones always crazy?” I said, walking back over to George and standing next to him. That seemed to be the right thing to say, because George laughed and then said, “You’re alright, Wish.” He asked me what I was doing there and I told him about all of the great stuff and George nodded and looked at me like I was important. I looked back, my heart beating hard. I knew this was it. I took a deep breath. “We should do something together,” I said. “You know I’ve got great ideas.” George looked at me, his little brown eyes full of some kind of emotion I just couldn’t get at and then he said, “Sure, let’s talk about that.” It was then that I knew all of my hard work was going to pay off. That there would be a point where I’d go home and my family wouldn’t laugh at me for being a piddling librarian. No one would ever laugh at me again. I was about to ask George about when we should get together when the crazy Nav chick came back. I thought she was going to hand him yet another drink, but she started pulling on him again and this time, he let her drag him out, smiling at me as he went, a couple of chicks on the stairs yelling, “Come on!” I turned around to look for Robert, but he was over by the dancer, who was nodding as he talked. She was looking over at the exit and running her hands through her long, dark brown hair. They talked for a little bit longer and then left together. But that was OK. I looked around for the crew I came in with, but they were nowhere to be seen. Even Lucy was gone. The only person I recognized was this crazy actress who’d gotten fat and was always hanging all over George. She was staring at the crowd, her eyes like the inside of an abandoned truck. I walked over to the bar and leaned in, working to get the bartender’s attention. I waved at her and she looked annoyed. I smiled. She put her back to me, reaching for a bottle of something violently green. I began to tear up, my throat constricting. A few minutes later, the bartender came over and I started to order a beer and stopped. I smiled again at the bartender who didn’t smile back and said, “I’ll have a shot of Patrón.” I watched her go, her short shorts riding up, the hot, wooden smell of the bar so familiar and cruel.

  Olivia James

  ADAGIO, ADAGIO, ADAGIO, slowly my arms pull across the blue New Mexican sky. I’m so careful with my arabesque, it’s so long and slow, adagio, adagio, adagio, this is dangerous. We bourrée across the stage towards the finish, all of us like a wave of tall, ocean plants, our roots undone, skittering across the bottom of the sea. As we finish, and the crowd stands and applauds, I keep my balance, and then we bow. I love it here, but there are too many ghosts. But then again, there are ghosts everywhere.

  HE PASSED ME THE BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE and I drank, the pink stuff I insisted on, the good stuff, pouring down the sides of my mouth, even though I’d tried to make sure that wouldn’t happen. To him, I’m just another thin, beautiful, ubiquitous dancer. Maria Tall Chief, he called me. When he asked me if I was Italian, I had laughed.

  “Come here,” he said, and I scooted closer towards him in the back of the long white limo. We were on our way to a party, and it was moving down the streets quickly, the lights from the street reflecting eerily inside the limo as we passed the street lamps, like we were on the surface of Mars. I looked up. I’d always wanted to visit Mars.

  I leaned against David, his tongue on my neck. “So much trash in New York,” I said.

  “You love the trash,” David said and I ran my long, thin fingers through his thick grey hair. I could feel his excitement as I did.

  “Sure I do,” I said.

  “You love me,” he said.

  “Sure I do,” I said.

  He sighed. “Olivia, Olivia, my tough little Indian.”

  “I’m 5’10. I’m hardly little,” I said, rolling my eyes. He couldn’t see them. He was kissing my neck. I let him go on for a while before I asked the question I’d been burning to ask since we left the auditorium. “Was I good tonight?”

  “There was no one more beautiful.”

  “But was I good.”

  “The best,” he said, but I couldn’t see his eyes.

  I REMEMBERED GOING TO POWWOW AS A CHILD. Daddy had started me dancing when I was two at the Indian Center downtown. When I started as a Tiny Tot, first at Fancy Shawl, then at Jingle, I won often. Won at Denver March. At Gathering of Nations. But I didn’t care. I had begged my father for ballet lessons since I’d first seen it on TV, the women swimming across the screen, so beautiful I thought my heart would burst. Those women could do anything, go anywhere, they were magical, they were magic. I lived in a shitty apartment on Colfax in Denver with my dad. He worked at the Presbyterian hospital as a janitor. But he found the money for lessons, because I wanted it. And daddy was so sweet, he always gave me what I wanted.

  The only thing I loved more than ballet was our Saturday mornings. Dadd
y would wake me with coffee and cereal, whichever kind I wanted. From the time I could remember, I insisted on something that would keep me thin. We would talk about our dreams. He would ask me about school. And he would always try to get me to eat more, because I would never finish the bowl. I knew even then that this life was all about discipline, about denial. But you’re already tiny! Dad would say and I would frown. Don’t do that. You break daddy’s heart. Then I would feel like crying. Daddy had it hard. Mom left when I was young, and he didn’t talk much about her, except that they had met when they were children in Oklahoma, that she was Choctaw and white, that she had been beautiful and tall and mean and funny. I knew that he still loved her, still thought she might come back. I knew she wouldn’t. I couldn’t even remember her. Maybe sometimes something would smell like her, like sweet almond oil, but I thought that’s what I wanted her to smell like. And I knew all of daddy’s dreams were about her.

  IN NEW YORK, I WAS IN LOVE. Développé, the teacher yelled, and our legs arced out and bent and moved slowly, painfully outwards like fans unfolding. En dehors, he yelled, and the circle began, and it hurt. I loved that pain. I was hungry. Not for food, for this life, this dance, these lilies after the show, for the stiff, pink tulle of our skirts, for my teacher’s love, approval, I couldn’t tell the difference. He was much harder on me than on any of the others, and to teach him that I was no one he could mess with, I would stay after, and do everything again and again until the lights would go off. Then I would ride the subway home to Brooklyn, my feet pounding, to another shitty apartment in another city that I shared with other dancers and artists, and I would fall into bed so that I could go to work the next morning at the coffee shop around the corner, so that I could live here, so that I could stay inside the magic for as long as this life would let me.

  IT WAS WHEN I WAS SIX that I began to take ballet. There was a little Asian girl in the class, the only other one that didn’t look like a little blonde angel in a leotard that had obviously been recovered from the local thrift store by her daddy, and I gravitated towards her. But she frowned and moved away and right then and there I determined that I didn’t need any friends, especially any girls as friends. The teacher had eyed me and my father curiously in that studio in the middle of Denver when we came in, my father looking shy and huge and so incredibly brown next to all of the thin, white mothers in their expensive running suits that even then, I suspected they never ran in. I was reminded of that scene in Alice in Wonderland, the one where Alice is picked apart by all of the nasty lady-flowers. But I stood tall as my father told me he would come for me as soon as the class was over. He had offered to watch me, but I had told him that that would only make me nervous.

  We began with the simple stuff, the baby stuff. But I had been doing traditional dance since I could remember, and I could move. The movements were different, but it was still dance. My tiny body bent and pointed, swayed, shuddered to the music. I loved the long, shiny wooden floors, the sound of the teacher’s voice, sharp and direct and forgiving when it could be, because after all, we were still children. I didn’t feel like a child. I felt like a soldier. A beautiful determined soldier with her hair up in a tight, angry, near-black bun. By the end of the class, I was tearing up. When we applauded, the tears escaped and I ran up to the teacher and hugged her thin, bony, hard-with-muscle body and her arms came over me and when I finally moved away, I tried to look as if I wasn’t crying. But there at the door was my father, and there were tears in his eyes, and the teacher smiled that thin, teasing smile that so many dancers have and I knew I had come home, home, finally all the way home.

  “TELL ME YOU LOVE ME,” David said.

  “Of course I do,” I said, rolling over in bed for a cigarette. We hadn’t had sex for a week, and David was beginning to be in a mood about it. I kept telling him that I had to save all of my energy for our upcoming performance, but that was a lie. The truth was that I knew that David was the kind of man you had to keep wanting.

  “But you never say it,” he said, sounding mopey and weak.

  I lit my cigarette and breathed in, the smoke jetting out into the cold, white-carpeted room, decorated in what David referred to as tribal. I supposed I fit right in. I looked down at my thin, yellow body, hard with muscle. I was strong.

  I tapped the ashes into the crystal ashtray by the side of the bed and asked David if he wanted one.

  “Yes,” he answered and I handed him the pack.

  “I thought you were quitting,” I said, drawing my legs up.

  “I’m European. I have to smoke. And watch futbal. Or they revoke my citizenship.”

  “When was the last time you went home?” I asked, looking at a large, red painting of a woman that David said had been a gift from someone long ago. She was tall and ethereal and there was something distant about her. It was my favorite painting in the apartment.

  David was silent for a moment. “Three years ago. For my mother’s funeral.”

  It was my turn for silence. Then, “I didn’t realize your mom was dead.”

  There are a lot of things we don’t know about each other,” he said and took a drag.

  “YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO LEAVE YOUR DADDY, are you?” Dad asked, and I squirmed. I was twelve, and practicing barre while watching a video of Swan Lake. Dad had found some materials for a makeshift barre at the junkyard outside of town and had nailed it all up on the side of the living room wall. He had even taken our carpet out and put wood floors in, another find from the junkyard. The video and the VHS had been acquired from the thrift store we liked to browse through on Saturday afternoons. I liked those afternoons, looking through junk, through all the racks and racks of dusty-smelling clothes. I was good at finding things that looked nice on me and daddy was good at finding things he could fix up. The TV had been given to us by one of the guys daddy played cards with on Friday nights. Occasionally, white lines would run through the screen, but it wasn’t that bad. And my teacher, who I loved dearly, gave me all of her videotapes to watch and practice with. I had started pointe the year before, and I was getting so good that my teacher was already talking New York, talking professional. She even let me come into the studios on Sunday when she wasn’t busy. We would run through routines, and she would correct me, shape my body, my mind. It was all I thought about. She had looked at me one Sunday, her lean body taut in the small wooden chair she was sitting in, her left hand massaging a sore foot. She stopped massaging and laughed, watching me practice a soubresaut. “You love this too much. It will be the death of you, you know.”

  Dad was sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in his big, rough brown hand, The Denver Post in the other. “Of course not dad. But I have to grow up,” I said, my left hand on the barre, my right leg executing a round de jambe. It was one of my favorite actions at the barre. They were so elegant and precise. All neatly tied up, the leg strict and straight and elegantly curving into a half-circle on the floor.

  “No, I don’t want that either.”

  I stopped dancing and looked over at him. “You’re silly dad.”

  He looked over at me and said something in Chickasaw that I didn’t understand. He would try to teach me a few words, and I remembered some, but all of the Natives around me were Navajo, or Lakota, or some Oklahoma mix like me, so what I knew in Indian was a mash-up. I understood more Spanish than anything in Chickasaw.

  I smiled at him, and he looked sad then, like I’d already grown up and left, like I was already far away. I went over and hugged him, hard and he held me, stroked my hair. Then he got up to make some more coffee. He stood at the window while it brewed, staring out at the grey, snow-covered streets, the light falling, the shadows on his face like a dream.

  “DAVID, WHEN ARE WE GOING TO EUROPE? I want to do just one show. I love New York. It’s wonderful. But I want more. I want Paris. I haven’t come this far only to stop here. I know that the best dancers stay here, with the New York City Ballet and it’s not like I want to tour, I just want
to dance in Paris, just once.”

  David sighed and put his fork down. We were dining in one of his favorite restaurants, a French restaurant. He knew the owners. Somehow there was a connection that led back to Europe before he’d come to New York. We were eating oysters, which I loved.

  “You have your audition,” he said, a slight smile playing on his lips. “Why do you think I ordered champagne?” I squealed, and I realized that I hadn’t felt like this since the time my daddy had taken me home to Texas for my birthday. Almost all of his relatives had settled in Dallas, and he’d saved up his money, and we’d driven for hours in his blue, beat-up Chevy until we were in front of my auntie’s little house. I had been surrounded by family. This was like that. It was better.

  “I’m so happy!” I said, and reached over and squeezed David’s hand.

  “I have requested some time off from the school and you will be in-between shows, so we can tour Europe.” He looked at me, love and affection clear in his gaze. “I can’t wait to see Europe through my little Indian’s eyes.”

  My head was filled with images of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, shoe and clothes shopping for the latest in Parisian fashion, parties in glamorous, golden-lit restaurants, streets filled with stylish and expensive-smelling people.