Excerpt from No Hard Feelings

Isadora Dance Foundation Photo

DROPPINGS FROM HEAVEN
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

There is nothing like having your face rubbed in your own waste when you are the greatest writer the world will ever know, especially when you believe your droppings are from heaven. Having your illustrious face so distastefully smeared by the very Pittsburgh industrialist you expect to be your patron can only compound your dismay. Therefore we can imagine how Paul Bowman felt after Senior told him over and over again that the articles Paul had sent him were "shit." While that was hitting the fan, Paul felt like punching Senior in the face, but did not do so for several good reasons.

One, John Wilson, Sr. was built like a brick shit-house. He was one of those self-made men who comes down out of his office from time to time to show everyone he can still do the grunt work in his plant, such as loading steel bars onto railroad cars. Besides his bulging muscles, Senior was surrounded by his usual sycophants at the Peculier Pub who would take none too kindly to their patron being punched in the nose.

Two, Senior was not only loaded with booze, he was otherwise fully loaded with what most poor people want, and the prospect, no matter how dim, of getting a substantial stipend to support his artistic endeavors kept Paul too submissive to throw punches at Senior or to even hurl a few obscenities.

Three, although Paul was no fool, as we can see from the first two reasons, he was a dumb dancer at the time. If someone told him his back yard was full of gold, he would tour the world in poverty, without a map or shovel, seeking hidden treasure, wondering all the while what the secret meaning of the message back home was. Even when he recognized the obvious value of something in front of his face, he pursued something else, something second-rate or obscure, as if he were afraid of fame and fortune. Unfortunately, despite their graceful antics, very few dumb dancers wind up with either fame or fortune; most retire with their memories to a room full of scrapbooks.

After Senior's castigations, to which Paul submitted like a willing flagellant, Paul did in fact get a glimpse of the truth through the smoke of his smoldering feelings which he had dampened even further by downing the shot of tequila Senior had bought him earlier.

"Senior is obviously an aggressive man of the world," he mused, "who makes no bones about letting people know what he wants and then taking it. I should be more like him, and then I would have the means to do what I want to do."

But that was a fleeting thought. It scurried away, not to recur to Paul during the next fifteen years of dancing around the number-one subject. Yes, Paul was weak in the asking and taking departments. He had helped other people get millions, but he had served himself rather poorly, taking only a tiny cut for himself. Because of his small interest in possessing things, the distance between him and destitution was narrow. Ironically, his greatest fear of all was of winding up on a park bench. Confounded, he often wondered why such a common source of distress as the fear of poverty was not the major concern of all mental-health experts. He simply could not get his wits about him long enough to realize that it was in fact their major concern, a phobia so common it did not warrant special treatment.

Paul had always been a dumb dancer metaphorically speaking—mind you, not all dancers are dumb—yet he was not always literally a dancer. In fact, he always fancied himself as a writer. But after many years of rejection he figured writing was futile, so he went up to Alaska to make his fortune or drink and snort himself to death, whichever might come first. He came down with cabin fever in midwinter. It really hit him hard one night, just as it did his neighbor, who shot up his own apartment with a rifle and wrapped himself around his entertainment console, hanging on to his television for dear life—the cops had a terrible time prying him off the console.

In Paul's case, he was doing dishes that night, and suddenly ascertained that he was a dying man going nowhere, a man destined to cheat himself out of his dreams. He saw a knife in the sink, was about to cut his wrists, and then and there, when he heard Madonna singing ‘Borderline’ on the radio, he started dancing with his dishrag—little did he know he was to be in the same studio with  her in New York a year late. The moving process rendered him ecstatic. When the music stopped, he sat down breathless and thought:

"Success is a real bitch. To hell with goals! I must dance! That's IT! I must dance! "

Paul enrolled in Jill Crosby's jazz dance class at Anchorage Community College the next day. He privately wept when he squeezed on his first pair of dance shoes, and not because they were two sizes too small.

Yet he did not give up writing altogether, at least not yet. That is why we find him sullenly stewing in his juices at the Peculiar Pub in Greenwich Village, stunned by Senior's criticism to the effect that his writing was a pile of shit because it was on the subject of Paul's love and salvation, the very foundation of the arts: Dance.

--To be continued--