Chapter Seven
Chapter
Seven
Twelve hours later, Danny woke up on his deflated air mattress still wearing his headphones.
When it came to cast albums, he had tried his best not to pick favorites—didn’t want to hurt the feelings of the characters who had been, by and large, his only friends.
But all that changed when Rent moved into the cassette tower.
Danny was obsessed. Obsessed like how his father was with the Mets, or Ma with her soaps, or his old teachers with Jesus.
The very second the rollers of the cassette touched the gears of his uncle’s old stereo, Danny’s life as he knew it was forever changed.
The music didn’t sound like anything he’d ever heard.
It sounded like something on the radio, blasted from the windows of some homecoming king’s sweet-sixteen Beemer.
The lyrics didn’t sound like Broadway lyrics; no one sang about their favorite things, or whistled happy tunes, or bragged about corn as high as an elephant’s eye.
They sang about lesbians and NYU and Marlboros and handcuffs and suicidal Mickey Mice.
There were words he’d never heard before, hundreds of words—Sontag, masochism, joogie boogie, Pablo Neruda, curry vindaloo.
The characters felt like people he’d pass on the street or stand next to at a crosswalk, real New Yorkers who were serious, and artsy, and gutsy, and never had to look at their subway maps.
Danny heard in Rent not just a world he wanted to know, but the purest essence of the New York he’d only just discovered, the New York he loved.
I’ll buy tickets, he thought. I’ll save up my allowance for the next two months and I’ll buy tickets to Rent.
“Yeah, you’re not gonna be able to get tickets to Rent,” Nina told Danny the next day at lunch. “They’re insanely expensive, like seventy-five bucks a pop, and you’d probably have to wait a year, at least.”
“Seventy-five dollars?!” Danny felt like he’d gotten the wind knocked out of him. “I’m never gonna be able to afford that! I’m already gonna get so busted for using Ma’s money to buy the album.”
Nina smiled, as if at a puppy’s antics. “Aww, guys—he calls his mom ‘Ma.’ ”
“Well, they do have twenty-buck seats,” Christian said, “and they’re available every day.”
“Yeah?” Danny sat up in his chair.
“Just one problem,” Astoria cut in, altogether too happy to break bad news. “You have to sleep overnight on the sidewalk to make sure you can buy them when the box office opens.”
Danny let out a laugh. That theater was in Times Square. No way was that safe, or legal, or sane.
“She’s…not joking,” Nina said, grimacing. “Kids sleep out there every night.”
Danny looked around, waiting for the first person to break and admit that they’d tricked him into believing yet another manifestly ludicrous factoid about Manhattan, like when Christian solemnly told him that Mayor Giuliani had hired a team of alligator wranglers from Florida to scour the sewer system for flushed pets that had grown to the size of the M66 bus.
But everyone looked back at him with the same sad seal eyes.
“On Forty-First?” Danny said. “That’s, like, the sketchiest block in the sketchiest neighborhood in town, isn’t it?”
Astoria nodded. “Isn’t that so punk?”
“But, like, what about the junkies? Don’t they try to rob you?”
Nina shrugged. “I’d suggest packing some Mace.”
“You can’t be serious! My mom would never let me. How the hell am I ever gonna see this show?”
“Well,” Astoria said, “it’s a good thing you’ve got your little cassette.”
Life at LaGuardia felt like being dropped from a helicopter into the without knowing the landscape, the language, or which snakes could paralyze you.
Danny’s academic classes weren’t too bad, for the most part.
He was ahead in math and science, which had never been his strongest subjects until he transferred to a school where half the class stopped counting after “a-five, six, seven, eight.”
But half-remembered trigonometry functions didn’t save him from the performing arts electives that happened every day after lunch.
Before he’d even set pied on the dance floor, Danny knew that ballet would be a challenge.
Before class, the guys gathered in the dressing room to change into fitted white tees and slim black tights.
Danny pulled his dance belt out of the cellophane wrapper, expecting to find something you wear around your waist. Instead, to his horror, he found a medieval torture device—a three-inch-wide band of elastic and a tan pouch made out of what looked like an oven mitt, connected to a string of fabric that might as well have been barbed wire.
“First time wearing a thong?” a guy named Ricky asked, watching through the mirror as Danny held up the undergarment like a rat by its tail. “You’ll get used to it. Just make sure everything’s facing uptown, if you know what I mean.”
Danny crab-walked into class, his hands clasped in front of his junk, as close as he’d ever been to living the nightmare where he showed up naked to school.
He slid into an empty space at the wooden barre against which his fellow classmates draped themselves in uncanny, geometric shapes.
Not wanting to look as clueless as he felt, Danny did a few of those little arm circles that he’d seen other lifeguards do before going for a swim.
Clapclap!
All eyes shot to the front of the room as a stooped old woman shuffled through the door. She wore a black unitard that clung to her bones like toilet paper on a mummy and a bun so tight on the top of her head that Danny wondered if she was even able to blink.
“Welcome, class,” she graveled in a voice that sounded like both Boris and Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle. Danny remembered her—the vampire-y woman who couldn’t believe he hadn’t brought sheet music to his audition.
“I am Madame Chernyshevsky.” She peered around the room with teacup-saucer eyes. “You are Drama students, no? Not Dance? Heh. Not ideal, but we make it work.”
Clapclap!
She nodded to the pianist, Jerry, the old guy from his Performance class, who began playing a twinkly lullaby song.
“Pliés! First position!” she barked. “A-one, two, three, four.”
Every student whipped around and placed their hands on the barre, standing with their heels together and toes spread apart like pizza slices.
“Plié down, two, three, four,” she said, walking down the line of leotard bodies, all sinking and rising in perfect unison. “And up, six, seven, eight.”
Danny’s body jerked in confusion.
How the hell did these kids already know this dance?
He tried copycatting the girl in front of him, with her long flamingo legs and fingers that moved like air through a wind chime.
“And forward, two, three, four. And back, six, seven, eight.”
Even though he couldn’t see her, Danny knew that he was being watched. Madame Chernyshevsky was standing right behind him. He could feel her breath on his shoulder, cigarettes and old stamps.
Just keep moving, he thought as he squatted into the plié like a dog trying to find a place on the curb to take a shit.
“You take ballet before?” the old woman wheezed in his ear.
“No, ma’am,” Danny muttered, continuing the knee bending dance.
“It shows,” she breathed, then slapped his arm with a gnarled hand, harder than Danny would have expected from a gal who had probably lived through the Siege of Leningrad.
“Elbow higher than wrist! And knees go straight over toes, not all hanky-panky like now.”
Danny tried to take the correction, but ended up smacking the girl in front of him as she turned to start pliés on the other side.
“Bozhe moi!” Madame Chernyshevsky muttered to herself, rolling her eyes and walking past him without saying another word.
Danny’s Wednesday elective was only slightly better—Movement class with Mr. Applebaum, who arrived twenty minutes late wearing an old corduroy jacket with a mustard stain on the collar and carrying a yellow Gristedes grocery bag filled with what looked to be roughly one thousand paper receipts.
“Get ready for this one,” Nina whispered in Danny’s ear. “He’s a real piece of work.”
“Ah, my merry thespians!” Mr. Applebaum announced, his voice slightly slurred like he had a dentist’s latex finger in his mouth.
“Welcome to Movement. This month, we’re focusing on how a character carries himself.
As the Bard would say, ‘suit the action to the word.’” He leaned against the chalkboard, his shoulder immediately smudged with chalk dust. “Now, for our first exercise, let’s divide you into two groups.
Lads,” he said, stumbling slightly as he waved them over.
“You, my lusty knaves, will be the Montagues.”
Danny exchanged a wide-eyed glance with Nina.
“And you, my fine lasses,” he said, gesturing to the girls. “My Capulets! Now, it’s your job to chase the Montagues and when you catch one, BAM, they’re OUTTA THERE!” Mr. Applebaum mimed swinging an imaginary bat.
Danny leaned over to Nina, whispering out of the corner of his mouth.
“So…we’re playing tag?”
“Sure are, Danny,” Nina muttered, stifling a laugh. “All his exercises are just variations on tag.”
But Shakespeare Tag and Boot Camp with Ivana Trump had just been warm-ups for the battle royale that was Scene Study class.
It didn’t take long for Danny to learn that the python teacher from his audition, Mr. Davenport, was the one person at LaGuardia everyone feared.
He was, as one classmate put it, “basically The Predator,” a deadly scout with heat vision for weakness and uncertainty.
Unlike the other teachers, who spent their free periods gossiping and drinking bad coffee in the faculty lounge, Mr. Davenport spent his free time stalking the halls, hoping to catch students cutting class or acting “unprofessionally.”
“That man is scary as hell,” Christian summed up at lunch. “He once subbed for a class I was in and made a girl cry because she didn’t know who Joan Crawford was.”