Colum McCann - Dancer

Antique accordions, violins, cellos, balalaikas, flutes, fiddles, a mahogany grand piano from William Knabe and Co: he surrounds himself with music.

In Stockholm he buys a glass case of rare fossilized ammonites. In Oslo, a cabinet made by Georg Kofoed Mobelfabrikant. In Rome he unfolds Chinese wallpaper panels depicting military scenes against a backdrop of herons, trees, temples. They are shipped to his island home on Le Galli near Capri. He makes a special trip to Nice to buy a series of Nijinsky photographs so he can study the poses, reset the steps, for which there is no written record. From Prague he orders hand-blown light fixtures from a glass craftsman. An Australian woman who deals in books sends him a steady supply of first-edition masters, mostly Russians. He rescues a grandfather clock from a trader in Singapore. From New Zealand he acquires a series of tribal masks. In Germany he buys a full set of dinner plates once used by a kaiser, the bone china trimmed with gold. From Canada he requests a cedar chest, since he doesn’t like to use mothballs, he has heard there is a particular forest where the cedar is best. He has flowers flown from Hawaii to his London home. And in Wales, where there is a mastery and respect for the form, he has a train set built for him by Llewelyn Harris, a craftsman in Cardiff, the models so real that when he lays them out on the floor he can sometimes remember himself at six years of age sitting on the hill above Ufa station, waiting.

It is one of those heartless streets you find in parts of the city where the light is still tense with yesterday’s darkness and even in the late afternoon it already feels like curfew and the spent trash of the day goes skidding along and pigeons sit gray on chain-link fences and the traffic is stalled and fume-blowing and the storefronts are dark and shadowy with filth and grime, Eleventh Street and C, Lower East, all smack and suicide, but Victor breaks it simply by moving down the sidewalk, making walking a form of dancing, beginning in the shoulders with a symmetrical roll not even the blacks have perfected, one oblong shrug of a shoulder and then the other, as if connected by synaptical cogs, first the left and then the right, but not just the shoulders, the roll moves down into his chest, into his rib cage, through the rest of his body, down to his toes— god made me short so I can blow basketball players without ruining my knees! — then up again to rest for a moment in his hips, nothing flagrant, no need to bring attention, the walk alone pays homage to his crotch, so if you are sitting on a brownstone stoop, high or hungover or both, you look up through the shit and the grime and the thousand other everyday torments too deep to mention and you see Victor coming along — looking like he’s the first man ever to whistle — in his tight black pants and his neon orange shirt, his black hair swept back, his teeth white underneath his dark mustache and his body in a roll that isn’t jazz or funk or fox-trot or disco, it’s just pure Victor from head to toe, an art he must have managed since birth, laughing as he walks, a chuckle that rises high and ends low, a Victor laugh, on impulse, like his body just told him a little joke about himself, and the whole day slips away while you watch him, the clocks stop, the guitars tune themselves in unison, the air conditioners hum like violins, the garbage trucks sound like flutes, and you sit rooted to the steps as Victor waves to the other queens hanging out the windows, wigs and feathers and lust, while he crushes a cigarette or ties a shoelace or raps on a windowpane, using a silver dollar so it sounds out, and there are whistles and catcalls

Victor having become even more famous six years ago, after the ’69 riots in Sheridan Square when he was arrested for violence and nudity— nude violence! — but then managed a hand job from a tall blond cop in the Sixth Precinct station, so Victor was talked about, laughed about, cheered in the bars baths backrooms of the city

and he moves on, in the empire of himself, taking a bow in front of the windowsills, Victor having learned every inch of the bow from his good friend Rudi Never-Off, holding the bend, arching his back, sweeping his arm to the sky, frozen for a second, grinning, then walking again, in the sequence of sun and shadow, down to the corner smoke shop, where he hauls deep on a joint with the pretty Puerto Rican boys who polish Victor’s shoes with a white bandanna while he goes inside barefoot to tell the shop owner, Man they should arrest the mass murderer who gave you that haircut, his own hair so thick and slick that it shines under the shop neon, buying himself a packet of Lucky Strikes, his whole life a string of lucky strikes, from the streets of Caracas to the cockcrow of the new world, beginning as a carpenter, then a waiter, then a hustler, then a house painter, and, after Stonewall, an interior designer, Yes, I’ll design your interior! taking only enough business to live the way he wants, knowing that the less a man works the more he is paid, one of the simple rules of New York City, and Victor has over the years proved many such simple rules to himself, his favorite being that if you live your life without falling in love you’ll be loved by everyone — one of the great laws of love and fuckery — you take what you get and you move swiftly away, no looking back, so that even the Puerto Rican boys on the stoop can’t hold him after sharing half their joint, he is gone once more, brightening the next street, and the next, hailed while shimmying along, the dealers reaching into their tight yellow trousers for a couple of quaaludes, free of charge, saying, Victor my man you tell those bluebloods where the real shit is at, all the dealers hoping for Victor business later that night, since Victor business is good business, Victor might well guide a large troupe to your stoop, so you can wake up tomorrow slung alongside your sweetheart with your heart singing and a fat roll of twenties under your pillow, and Victor smiles as he takes the pills, saying Gracias —one of the two Spanish words he uses, gracias and cojones, both of them pronounced in three long syllables — like he’s chewing for a moment on the childhood memory of Venezuela, the filth, the dogs, the soccer balls rolling towards the sewer pipes

when Victor was eight there was a statue said to have been sunk in the harbor at La Guaira near Caracas, a Virgin Mary, a story so vital to the townspeople that they brought pearl divers in, to no avail, they believed the Virgin would appear in a year of goodness and plenty, so when Victor was dragged out of the water, gasping for air, clutching the old and grimy statue, he was showered with money and gifts, and he took his mother and brothers to America, leaving a quarter of the money with the craftsman who had chiseled the statue for him, a perfect fake, so even then Victor knew that desire was just a stepping-stone to more desire

and he heads farther west through the Village, past a whore in hot pants wiggling her hips as if her body is on hinges, past the bums in bandannas selling the last of their Occidental Death! T-shirts, past the wheelchair beggars, past the black hipsters up against the railings on St. Mark’s Place, past the farm boys high on their first taste of amphetamines, all the flotsam and jetsam of America, and on Second Avenue Victor drops some money in the cup of a young addict, she looks up to tell him she has never seen a groovier shirt, her eyes two puddles of mascara, and he drops another dollar in her smack cup, then skips around the spray from a fire hydrant, crosses Third Avenue, down the stairs at Astor Place, no logic to his skipping, two steps one step two steps three, waving to the clerk in the booth then jumping the turnstile while the clerk shouts, Hey man, pay your goddamn fare! and Victor nods to the passengers when he gets on the train, smiling, winking, never a lonely part of the city for Victor, not even on the subway, which he rides without sitting, without touching the metal bars or hanging straps, his legs spread wide for balance, as if preparing for the night in advance, jumping off the 6 train at Grand Central for four cigarettes and a cocktail in the Oak Room, vodka and grapefruit juice, a two-dollar tip to the bartender, money is to roll that’s why they made it round, and then he weaves through the station against the rush of commuters, turning, zigging, zagging, down the litter-strewn steps to the Grand Central bathrooms — no place too nice for Victor and no place too nasty — already the rank smell of piss wafting through the t-room air, Victor announcing himself with the sort of composure that comes from a magazine, his lips pursed, his cigarette held high between his fingers, past the rectangular mirrors where a dozen men line up like a row of appetizers, Victor giving a nod to a pale-faced boy and a black man, tentative looks on their faces, unsure, he might be a cop or a queer-basher or a slicer, there’ve been some stabbings in recent years, but Victor reaches in his pockets, hands them each a quaalude, they relax and smile, down the pills, and all three dip into a stall, and soon they are laughing, touching, kissing, spooning, unspooning, until twenty minutes later Victor emerges to rinse his face and his neck and his armpits, other men watching, the rumor of Victor rippling among them, longing and jealousy in the row of mirrors since a blow job from Victor is currency in the city, a badge, an autograph, a nightclub rope suddenly lifted, hey I’m a friend of Victor Pareci’s, but if you look around for Victor he is always gone, the sort of man you need precisely because he isn’t there, always off somewhere else, his heart strung out on helium and all the valves have opened and he has been propelled elsewhere, out of your reach