Read Part of 'Where There is Movement' by Evan Knapp

Where There

is Movement 

by 

Evan Knapp

Leave a note. I had to, so they wouldn’t worry.

I’d found myself lost in my lifelong home, a modest ranch-style house on 17^th Street in a small Oregon college town. I was sitting on a stool at the yellow Formica counter in the kitchen, beside the brand-new matching wall mounted push-button phone, with a ballpoint pen twitching restless in my hand. It wrote a jabbing, fully executed sentence, “I won’t be home for dinner.”

I thought I had a mostly normal, minimally average middle-class family. My Dad rode his bike to work, even when it was raining, clamping a thin metal horseshoe shaped clip on his right pant leg to protect it from the biting teeth on the chain. Dr. Knapp, a music professor at Oregon State University, Elementary Ed. He was an absent, mindful, kind, quietly charismatic man who wore glasses which left behind oval indentations on each side of his nose. Mom taught kindergarten. They’d lived there long enough to have had a few of the same students. People rarely left Corvallis. Mom and Dad, even after guiding others’ young Fall to Spring didn’t know how or what to do with me. I’d made the decision to leave four days earlier, but not until the blue ink formed those six words did I know I would act.

Dad had a forest green T-shirt which he wore tucked into brandless jeans. He wouldn’t wear it often, but when he did, he wore with it a sly, barely detectable grin behind his thick glass glasses. “Musicians Use The Rhythm Method.” Well, their rhythm was off fifteen years earlier. I was the oops who accelerandoed out to play with my own phrasing. They thought they could only make girls so I didn’t have a name for a few weeks. Mom actually asked the doctor, “Are you sure?” when he told her my sex. “Yes ma’am, I’ve been a doctor for (mumble mumble) years. I’m sure.” Under my baby picture from the hospital, in legible handwriting, I’m labeled, “Knapp Boy.”

Dad wanted to name me Lucian. Vetoed. Instead, I got Evan. Evan Lucian. No, James is my middle name, my Dad’s first name, but his mom didn’t like it, so he’d always gone by the first three letters of his middle name, Gilbert. I was six years younger than my middle sister Paula, eight from Karna, and eleven years younger than their first unnamed stillborn girl.

Paula was unsure and always a little bit scared. “Five-foot eleven and three quarters,” she barely told anyone who asked her height. She cared nothing about her runway beauty. Her condor fingers were perfectly suited to the black and whites. I would lie on my stomach for hours, on the striped earth-tone carpet next to the piano, and listen to her practice rich, flowing Chopin, and my favorite, pounding, dissonant Bartók. She escaped to the granola-rich, patchouli-polluted University of Oregon in Eugene when I was in eighth grade. She took a year off after high school to go with Mom, Dad, and me to live in Scotland. A year-long professor exchange program with some Glaswegian family. 

We lived in their stone rowhouse, close to the Botanical Gardens, and across the street from the BBC studios. The year I started growing hair on my undercarriage and also the year I first told someone I was gay. Yeah, didn’t turn out well. Paula played the cello too, and was also a pretty good distance runner.

Karna had run through the acceptable channels. She got good grades. She lettered in gymnastics, diving, track: a high jumper and even at 5’4” she cleared the hurdles. She put herself through four years at the University of Washington on a partial gymnastics scholarship, almost far enough away. After earning her degree in dance she moved to Singapore and taught aerobics to cosmopolitan office workers. I didn’t get a chance to really get to know her until I was almost thirty, a few years after more than one drug-induced psychotic episode scared me sober. I really like Karna. She’s nice.

And Mom, with her full head of barely brushed, rarely contained gray hair, blue eyes and her perfect-teeth smile. She loved to watch football while crocheting, blaring the live Saturday NPR broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera. She used to call me her sunshine boy, but once I started high school she started leaving books like Tough Love on the un-ornate Scandinavian teak furniture.

My freshman year. I was leery of the second school I was attending. I was the first kid in the history of the district granted a fast, discreet transfer. The most outgoing, popular, naive little limpet up until seventh grade, my cute charm and quick tongue had stopped being enough. I didn’t understand. I couldn’t ask my sisters, they weren’t there. I had this feeling my parents were simply tired of raising children and thought talking to them wouldn’t have helped. Instead I tried to hide from the ever-growing crowd who regularly slashed through my thin, underdeveloped frame. The bullies would kick my shins when I walked by them. If I chanced upon one of those mau-mau Neanderthals when nobody else was in sight, a punch to the stomach. After some of the football team used almost a whole roll of duct tape to suspend me from a locker one regular morning between classes, I flew home on my bike and stayed in bed for three days. I didn’t get why no one helped me. Student after classmate, I think even a teacher walked by and did nothing. It wasn’t until one of my friends came to the house to check on me did my parents know what’d happened. I told them I would never go back to that school.

I was singled out because I hung out with the edged-out, the thespians, the smokers, punks, mods, the Wave-os, the dancers from my third period dance class—you could take it instead of P.E.—and I ran with my packs outside of school, buzzed on clove cigarettes, sharing one or three wine coolers among us, listening to Suicidal Tendencies, Oingo Boingo, Siouxsie Sioux, David Bowie, Bauhaus, Bronski Beat, Black Flag and Christopher Cross on a suitcase-sized boom box. OK, in my room, never around those guys, I’d play “Ride Like the Wind,” or Chicago or Billy Joel: “…he’s been misunderstood, it’s a comfort to know his intentions are good. He sits in a room with a lock on the door, with his maps and his medals laid out on the floor. Give a moment or two to the…” Maybe I never all-the-way fit in with any group.

In a dusty thrift store, I found a pair of well-worn combat boots I thought would protect more than my feet. One afternoon, scuffing and partially laced, they walked by the door of the only ballet studio in town.

They stopped me right there.

Then they took me in.

It didn’t matter to Mr. Irwin I showed up in my favorite neon-green English Beat T-shirt; I first heard them on a compilation album, This Are Two Tone, which I thought was awesome, because It Are Wrong. And Mr. Irwin saw around my spectrum-spanning hair colors and plaid pajama bottoms rather than the required black tights. He only cared I showed up every afternoon ready to work, ready to learn. I showed up every afternoon, ready.

Ballet is hard. Civilians have no idea. The technique, the discipline, the absurd dedication necessary. I pushed my body, ripped my muscles, exploded my lungs, popped mushroom-size blisters on the bottoms of my feet, then tore off the flap of skin: pause, pause… pause YANK. I hadn’t worked hard enough unless there was blood.

Not only was it OK to express myself, my selves, in the studio, it was encouraged. I’d discovered my home, not like my house, not modest. I felt embraced and protected, a part. I’d found my outlet.

There, air for my emerging, sputtering sparks; kindling proems to roaring fires. There, freedom to meld with oneness; dancing is time transcendent. There was where I was meant to do.

For some reason, Dad got it. When I was about 10, Sundays after church, he would take me bowling in the basement of the student union, a few structures and a courtyard from his office in Benton Hall, the very first building constructed on campus. When we’d played our twenty frames, he’d take me upstairs to the cafeteria and let me order whatever I wanted, usually a corndog with mustard, and he would let me get my own soda pop from the self-serve fountain. I mixed a little bit of each kind in my wax-coated cup. “Swamp juice,” he named it. I know now, there were other things he could have named for me.

After he died, Mom told me he never really wanted to teach. He wanted to be a professional singer. He toured Europe with an all-male chorus called The Bohemians, but he didn’t have the chops to venture out on his own. He had a good voice, just not a great voice. I turned out to be a good dancer, just not a great one.

He met Mom when they were in college in the Midwest, and followed her to Oregon after they graduated. She got the first job she applied for, a teaching position in Portland. She’d turned down Dad’s proposals when they were co-eds. She wasn’t a cheerleader at all, but as a beautiful young woman (Dad, by the way, was a handsome young man) the star quarterback had already pinned Mom. 

When I came across a photo of said hunky guy, I asked her “Who’s he?” She told me. I wonder what it would’ve been like if he’d been my dad.

So, after Dad followed her West, he got a job in a clothing store, folding sweaters, and “patting socks,” as he put it whenever he told the story. Mom finally said yes. I love the picture of them off to their honeymoon, the en vogue shot, twisting toward each other, looking at the lens with beautiful, genuine smiles through the back, rounded window of their car.

Dad and singing. It brought him joy, not money. He pursued, instead, his family. He gave them the opportunities. Us, he gave us the opportunities. There were mortgages, college funds, the years it took him to get his teaching job, and later his Ph.D. I was born in 1967, the year he was finishing up his coursework to become Dr. Knapp, before he started his dissertation. Nineteen sixty-seven, the year of the sheep, goat or ram depending. My birthday, March 30^th, makes me an Aries, fire sign, the ram. I am a burning double ram goat sheep.

He helped me. He knew I was suffocating in high school. He pulled some strings with them so they would let me go half days, then pulled a few more at OSU so I could go to the university in the afternoons to take modern dance classes with the college kids. Intimidating, but getting to dance with adults—and they had live drummers, and the studio was huge—shushed the inadequate and the shy in my head. When I was done there, I’d go to Mr. Irwin’s and chameleon into a danseur; pliés, tendus, jumps, turns. My unhindered, unparalleled amour.

At night, I was out with my fringe friends, dancing in vacant lots, parking lots, playgrounds, at the drive-in on the hoods of cars, doing the pogo, the pony, skank to ska, popping and locking. I’d come home late and stretch, go over choreography, eat air-popped popcorn, carrots dipped in mustard, and wash it all down with Fresca. Once, I razored down the over-the-counter caffeine pill Vivarin to an uneven powder and snorted it. So cool, I thought, starving myself like I imagined real dancers did, doing lines of fake coke and chain-smoking Benson & Hedges Ultra Lights 100s in the mirror. I turned myself into a ninety-eight-pound weakling, my face a target for kicked sand. I became as thin as the little town saw me, but I was thickening my façade and I was teenager know-it-all strong. The truth and clarity I knew in dance, the chimerical sustenance beating through my soft cells, untainting love, remaining my secret, my never-draining battery, my stringent binder-blinding focus. Kick as much of whatever you want at my face. I was becoming.

I was urged to audition for a summer intensive workshop at Reed College in Portland. I had never been to a dance audition before. They gave me a full scholarship. What I lacked in technique, I made up for with a transparent, gnawing-raw, slavish desperation.

Before we got in the car I convinced Mom to let me go. It didn’t take much.

I think it was during my electric blue hair, bleached-white eyebrow phase. She took me aside and told me since I was a teenager now, she would give me the same options she gave my sisters. If I didn’t want to go with them to a movie or out shopping, I didn’t have to. If we were in public and I didn’t want to be seen with my dorky parents, I could walk on the other side of the street. I didn’t have to go to church anymore unless I chose to, and if she was dropping me off somewhere, she would let me out a few blocks away so I wouldn’t be embarrassed. I thought she was the most awesome Mom ever until I realized those allowances were not for my benefit. She’d never needed to have that talk with my sisters.

She drove me up to Portland the moment I scraped through ninth grade.

She told me, “Remember who you are,” something she often said to me when I was leaving. I did remember who I was. Part of the oneness, the truth I was determined to funnel through my long-limbed body. I didn’t share it with her. I didn’t think she could ever understand. “OK, I will,” I auto-answered. Then I locked and shut the car door. I called home that night, then once a week, like they’d asked me to. They had the number, but I don’t remember them calling to check on me.

Tom. Everyone at the workshop wanted Tom, also a dancer, but not on scholarship, and he was 18. Tall, dark, hands finishing the lines of his arms perfectly. He was ridiculously gorgeous, with a wry-dry wit inside his fantastical dancer body. Somehow, I’m not sure why, I was the one, or maybe one of the ones he picked. He took me back to his house. He lived in a nice neighborhood, with his family, a short bus ride away. We went down to his basement bedroom. Exciting. It’s happening. My first time. We were sitting on his bed, shoulder to shoulder, thighs barely touching, tentatively taking off clothes, looking at each other’s growing definition through white cotton Y-fronts, when his sister slammed open the door, banging it against the wall so hard it bounced back and she had to freeze it with her forearm and palm.

“My cream rinse! You used my…” and she stopped.

She didn’t know Tom was gay, or maybe she did. She did see me, the gay kid trying to disappear behind her brother. She never spoke to me. Tears and words and backing up. Tom, hopping, jumping, pulling out of the room, trying to get back in both pant legs, both legs at a time. Me sitting there. Disappointed. Embarrassed. Shamed.

I needed more class. On the weekends, I took the bus downtown and went to all of the studios I could find. I managed a scholarship with a strictly ballet school. I applied for and received a work-study arrangement with a semi-professional contemporary ballet company where I scrubbed toilets and vacuumed the carpets in the lobby, office, and dressing rooms. I found a Dunham-based African/jazz teacher, Benny Bell, who gave me free classes and eventually let me perform in two of his shows: “Real Men Eat Quiche” and “The Ritual.” The youngest in the ensemble, but I still got paid.

A group of us from the workshop would go downtown to the Saturday Market under the Burnside Bridge. We met a brood of break-dancers. We started taking turns dancing on the stony, uneven pavement. They carted in their flattened cardboard. We spun on our heads and tails for change. “Don’t just watch and walk away, these dancers need to eat today,” we chanted, and also had written on the paper bags we moved through the onlookers after each routine.

Downtown too, I met some of the urchins who lived on the streets. They wore anarchy patches on their shredded jeans—shredded because they were old and worn, not because they were bought pre-distressed. They wore bottle-cap-sized buttons with nuclear symbols, black and white checkerboards, or bands or slogans: Duran Duran, F_ _ K Iran, the C and U taken out, because wearing actual profanity in public was going too far. I wanted the one, RUDE BOY. Those kids, those I wanted to copy, had safety pins through their shirts and ears, stacks of thin silver-chiming bracelets on their arms and hard spiky finned hair soaring down the middle of their heads. They liked me. No one freaked out because I wanted to make out with guys. None of them wanted to beat me up. I was just that dancer kid. They weren’t posers, they were real. The kind of friends I trusted with my life, but not my possessions.

I didn’t want to go back to the distant small town, home, or whatever it was called. I asked my parents if I could stay the rest of the summer and dance with the companies I’d elbowed my way into. They agreed. Hesitation none. I found a room in a house with some college students and pretty much did the same thing I’d been doing, except it was still summer so not the school part. Dance all day, dance all night, dream about dance, smoke.

The pinhole in the membrane between the material world and the infinite was stretching. Each time I learned something new about technique or performing, I took it as a confirming present, ever increasing my understanding it was possible to channel the never-ending cache of pure creativity. The euphoria I found in the studio was rarely a little scary. It pulled me like a treasure hunter who’d finally found Pandora’s box, reluctant but possessed to open the lid and let everything out. I didn’t know the story then, but intrinsically, wishful and unworldly, I knew there was hope in there.

I memorized my now life: hanging out on sidewalks, cutting each other’s hair with anything sharp, preferably at bus stops where the hated yuppies could watch. Class, all of the classes, all of the nourishment. My now-only food groups: caffeine, nicotine, flirting, aspiring, Charleston Chews, and flirting. Then, my summer was over.

Incarcerated in high school again, the bullying began anew. “FAG.” “Nice hair faggot.” No! Dancer! I’m a dancer. I’m that dancer kid. My adequate grades swiftly melted into painful failing stains.

I wanted to be around all my edged-out friends but slipped into a group obstinately hurdling toward evaporation. Up until then, I liked the idea of taking drugs more than actually taking them, but one afternoon I caved. Someone had a joint. We were beside the football field by a creek and all of these thin drooping limb trees. Instead of saying “No thanks” like I normally did when it passed to my turn, I took some deep pressured hits. I think it was laced with something. I didn’t like the feeling. It amplified my self-consciousness beyond what I could mask with eyeliner and a lotta what-have-yous. It didn’t wear off in time. I was more than stoned when I made it home, but tried to play it off as angst. The marvel was watching my parents pretend nothing was wrong as they saw me altered for the first time.

And then began the bribes.

The biggies: In addition to the dance classes I was taking in Corvallis, they told me I could go up to Portland on the weekends, to keep taking classes there. I could go on the Greyhound, by myself, and they would pay for my roundtrip bus tickets, if, I pulled my grades up to at least B’s. Also, Karna was still in Singapore. Mom was going to go visit her (most probably uninvited) and proposed I could go too if I got a job to pay for half of my plane ticket.

To Mom and Dad, excellent offers. In reality, nullifying world-annihilating booby-traps. I would still be drowning in scarlet C’s and D’s even if I aced every assignment, quiz, test and exam from right then through to finals. Getting a job to pay for half my flight halfway around the world would make it impossible to go to my dance classes. I was never going to let that happen. I sensed their agenda. I was welcome to dance as long as it didn’t interfere with me working a job, graduating high school and fulfilling their never directly expressed expectation of going to college, then probably grad school, and then what—marriage and makin' babies? The message (in their-era song lyrics) was clear: “Straighten up and fly right.”

I love my Mom, now. We didn’t speak for more than five years but when we finally did, we found a way to get passed the past. We went camping at the beach for a weekend and piece by piece dug up those bad years and talked about them, sort of. I told her I forgave her. She said, “I haven’t done anything that needs forgiving.” It took a night’s sleep for me to figure out what I meant, and to figure out why she said what she did. The next morning, as I was lighting the fire, without ever looking up, I said, “Mom, for not knowing what to do with me.”

When she was 76, I was the one she trusted to see her decline. I was the one who was there full days and nights while she was dying. She let me fly my partner out when I needed a similar but different kind of support from him. He and I slept in the same bed, a wall away, and took turns getting up to sit with her when the pain from her bone cancer lengthened her nights. She wouldn’t take any medication. She was a Christian Scientist, determined to live to the last the way she had long before chosen, or maybe her parents had chosen for her. I placed my beliefs on hold to respect hers. It was her time, not mine. I made her favorite foods, even though she wasn’t really eating; recipes from the Depression, her childhood, and subsequently mine.

On a rainy afternoon, I drove her out to the first school she’d taught at in Corvallis. She couldn’t remember its name, so we went there to recapture it. She thanked me, then again. I didn’t know remembering a name from her past could mean so much. To be beside her again in her present, to hold again a fond memory.

The night before she went to some Christian Science care facility, a few minutes before she was almost asleep, I went in her room and curled up on the floor next to her bed.

My deadline to pick up my grades and a job was close. This one night, I brought a guy over when I thought my house was asleep. Exciting. Maybe it’ll happen this time. It was late. I took him into the TV room and we started fooling around. Heavy petting, a little dry humping, heavy panting. Soon pants had pulled pants down. I looked up and there she was, standing in the doorway, watching but not looking. She calmly told the guy to leave, sat me down, got a deck of cards and dealt herself a game of solitaire. Without ever looking up she told me, “A mother knows,” and in the same breath said she was taught homosexuals were in the same category as drug addicts and prostitutes. She said she would talk to my father. My father? What happened to my Dad? My memory is smudged, but I do remember her cheating, so as she said her last word she covered the last queen with the red king on the stack of hearts.

They told me I’d blown my trip to see Karna, not because I was caught about to play with some guy’s boner, but because of the job and the grades thing. The next weekend came, and I was ready to be dropped off at the bus station, to go take my classes in Portland. They didn’t budge. Mom did the talking while Dad stood there with a look in his eye I’d never seen before. Empathy, understanding, but mostly a twinge of his own personal disappointment time traveling to be with mine. No, the answer was no, N.O. they wouldn’t let me go.

I knew they were expecting me to take off right then, so I didn’t.

Unrestful, I waited through the rest of the weekend and forced myself to school on Monday. During the period before lunch, a surge gurgled, a bubbling sulfur mud pit, tarry with things I couldn’t define. I ran, feeling my way down the industrial carpeted hall to a bathroom. My eyes were spitting tears. None of them ran down my cheeks. My vocal cords were sounding a noise like the terrifying, barking-call of an elk being yanked through liquid iron by a back leg.

I didn’t care about the trip. I would do anything; stay in school, get beat up every day, find my brown hair and pair it with Izods, go to church to stand and sing, smile and nod, and yes, even make pleasant conversation in the foyer with blue-haired old ladies, but I could not, would not, would never ever make it, unless I could be in the studio.

Sitting back down in the classroom the teacher walked toward me. She got out one and a half syllables of the obligatory, “Are you OK?” and it erupted again, in front of everyone. I couldn’t stop the damn tsunami rushing the enormity of the past few days into large-scale microscopic view. The teacher backed up. Everyone else froze and stared. Exiting the typing class the second time, I took a stumble. I actually had to crawl a little to evacuate due to loss of emotional cabin pressure. No calm. There was nothing orderly about it.

I don’t know when or how it stopped. I don’t know how I got home. I don’t know how I managed to zip myself up to make it through the sticky small talk garnishing dinner, while a mange-gnarled Snuffleupagus sat in the corner. I do remember looking at the knife on my napkin, the serrated edge turned toward the fork to protect the spoon, which is how it was explained to me when I was taught to set a table properly. And I needed to protect my spoon, which fed my boundless body, so I could blend my intellect with my emotions.

My plan was simple. I called my friend Karena after dinner. She had a car, a red 1967 Mustang named Maurice. I asked her if she’d pick me up during lunch and take me to the bus station. I told her I was running away from home, and there was a green silence. I walked out the door the next morning like I was going to school, but instead, climbed over a fence and waited in a neighbor’s backyard until I was sure Mom and Dad had gone to work. Time got long. My heart strangled diluted beats. With my key, I broke back in to my own house. I packed, but only the important stuff: Dippity-Doo, the October GQ, cigarettes, dance clothes. I laced tight my combat boots, double knotted them and sat down at the kitchen counter. I knew I wasn’t coming back. They knew exactly where I was going. I didn’t have to explain anything, and really, then, I didn’t know how. The only place I would be able to make sense of anything was as a conduit in my wordless, moving world.

Karena came and got me. She gave me some money. I said, “Thanks,” as I grabbed my bag and got out of her car. I turned for her to see me through the window as I waved and said, “See ya.” I was Pat Benatar, riding the bus to the chorus of “Love is a Battlefield,” to meet up with my dancers in a dancehall-hooker club, to punch out the choreography to the chorus, “We are young! Heartache to heartache, we…” I had a five, eight crumpled ones and a two-dollar bill. More than enough. When I got to Portland, I never knew exactly where I was going to sleep, or the next time I’d have dinner, but 

I always, always, always made it to class.

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