And the first song? A great big American lunar crooner, Bingle or Johnny Fontane, sliding around on "Stalag by Starlight." She plays it to accompany the somber, stricken threading together of the two partner-seeking lines. Kraft, still stunned by the subterfuge, falls into line behind the last male. He watches the mating gears mesh — man in eye patch falling to woman with Parkinson's, man with heavy loop of keys hanging from his belt going to tiny, terrified Filipina who came to dance class seeking the one social activity in this newfound land that she thought would require no English.
He notices how the kids have rigged the line, counting off furiously in tandem, then weaseling into position so as to draw each other as opposites, the lesser of available humiliations. Yeah, it's starting to come back to him. All that lunch-line, recess, sports-field, field-trip, bus-stop practice in positional long division. Numbering backward by fours. Converting hours to the final bell into minutes and seconds and heartbeats. Turning margin inches into inch-and-a-quarters. Figuring necessary goals or runs per period, minimum final exam scores for a passing GPA. Around-the-world flash card drills — the countless calculations of departure. How many miles to Babylon?
All but the most incapacitated join in, grab a partner, spread themselves dubiously across the makeshift dance floor. Joy, who could limp through the calls better than a few of those who grimly but gamely take part, sits out the first set. She takes a seat next to the carved-up Ben, where they whisper and giggle to each other behind cupped hands, pointing out mismatches and clunky practice turns. Across the improvised ballroom, like munchkin cadres infiltrating the Emerald City Residenz, the urban disinherited prepare to stage a naturalist production of Rosenkavalier.
Something more than fear of Nico's wrath compels them, although a few well-timed glares from the boss do their bit to keep the ranks in file. The dance-capable among them pair off with a minimum of foot dragging, with only the Rapparition being dealt to an adult, a blue-rinsed lady in snugly tummy-tucking sequins, completely dazed by the consort that fate's conga line has assigned her tonight.
Kraft reaches the head of the snaking cue, only then discovering that another once-child has remembered the lingering, line-rigging trick of early education. "Hi there, hunk," Linda baits him, taking him by the stethoscope skitcher and hauling him to a corner up near the stage, where they can get a good view of the terpsichorean demo just now getting under way.
God knows how these folks justify billing festivities as Beginners' Night. The pedagogical Ginger, outfitted with a wireless throat mike, begins by chirping, "You all remember last week when we learned…" Well, Kraft doesn't remember last week. He has trouble remembering this afternoon. And trying to isolate the beautiful, liquid steps that she and her Asian Astaire float upon is like trying to parse flowing Arabic script. "Come on, Ahab," Linda implores him. "Shake a leg."
It's either that or become a spectacle, gawked at, even shown up by the same shabby underage irregulars he himself sewed together. You all remember the fox-trot, don't you? The bit from last week? The pogo stick, the frug? Teacher sets the tape machine turning again, heads sensing, speakers singing out a simulation of "Night and Day," a tune that dispels the nonballroom world, consigns its latest flash points to somnambulist thrashings. The song, the woman swaying gently up against him, the kids stumbling through instructed motions on all sides, the pathetic Women's Club two-hundred-watt spot standing in for a harvest moon seduce him, like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom. Okay, let's have at it then. Hum a few bars and I'll fake it.
The songs queue up in what quickly becomes a full-color historical atlas of the dance academy at large. The complete curriculum, fiendishly arranged to lead them from fox-trot to tango to don't-mean-a-thing-if-you-ain't-got-that-swing. A step for everything, and everything its step. They dance to "Blue Skies," to "Stormy Weather," to "Misty," to "Paper Moon," to "April Showers," to "I Can See Clearly Now (the Rain Has Gone)." Oh, how they dance to "The Anniversary Waltz." They samba their way through show numbers of those good, God-fearing, nativer-than-thous, Friml and Romberg. They do these mongrel North American polkas to tunes half Protestant hymnody, half "The Yellow Rose of Texas."
They do a slogging "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp," a passel of barn dances, a reconditioned "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," a "When the Saints" packed with imminent expectation, and a resigned boxcar deportation of "Hobo's Blues." As a hat-tip to the Mother Country, they get a buttered-up rumba version of that pseudo-franglaised Fab Four hit (one of Kraft's least favorite of his childhood's Top Forty). This being the Unided Snakes, the tape bears a fair share of ballistics motif, from "Fired Our Guns (but Those Whoosits Kept A-Comin')" to "Pistol Packin' Mama." Kraft watches his recent small-caliber facial-trauma cases prancing to "Put it down before you hurt someone."
They do wild shimmy-Charlestons not approved by any tango-tea ever sponsored by the Official Board of Ballroom Dancing. Their steps whisper of suppressed or denied covert influences — Iberian, Cuban, black, black, black. Alongside the handgun hop, they do the walkaway, the stamp-and-go shanty, the old Chisolm trailblaze. We're homeward bound, I hear them say. Good-bye, fare you well, good-bye, fare you well. We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.
When they can't quite control the proper heel-toe, they make up a sequence of their own. It hobbles Kraft to see, peripherally, just what naturals they are. Teacher goes around the room privately tutoring each clinch. That's it; you've got it. And out… two… three-and-now-sweep-through, two… three-and-come-back-home, two… Some of the band are more than competent. Even good. And only the periodic "Get off my bloody foot, you Homo sapiens; your epidermis is showing" betrays the fact that tonight's class is packed to breaking with third-age, quarter-sized fifth columnists.
When they can't quite control the proper heel-toe, they make up a sequence of their own. It hobbles Kraft to see, peripherally, just what naturals they are. Teacher goes around the room privately tutoring each clinch. That's it; you've got it. And out… two… three-and-now-sweep-through, two… three-and-come-back-home, two… Some of the band are more than competent. Even good. And only the periodic "Get off my bloody foot, you Homo sapiens; your epidermis is showing" betrays the fact that tonight's class is packed to breaking with third-age, quarter-sized fifth columnists.
The regulars — who are these people? If they come, as their packaging advertises, from the right side of the tracks, they are still living testimony that even the better berm is everywhere shard-strewn. The twosome just tangent to Linda's twirl exchange bios. She is a thrice-singled mother whose last husband has recently kidnapped her youngest girl and disappeared into the invisible consumer ratlands between Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys. Her dancing companion for this first set has recently been convicted of drunken driving manslaughter and sentenced to pay the parents of the victim a dollar a month for each of the eighteen years of the victim's life.
Everyone: Arabs in black glasses, would-be aerobiots with legs like stovepipes, homeowners destined for a hotel death, mestizos of every conceivable blood-cocktail concoction, timid souls who've done time in the self s prison for removing manufacturers' stickers from mattresses. A powerfully built man, Karok or Modoc or Yurok, turns the prescribed box step into a sad stenographer's account of the ghost dance, shuffling, dragging left foot, humming hu-hu-hu in hope of a return to aboriginal safety away from this place where promise and threat both push to breakpoint.