Fosse Read Online Free PDF Page B

throw-up time.
    “Oh, Bobby . . .”
    “Come
on,
Bobby . . .”
    When the girls found outhe wasn’t the eighteen-year-old he said he was, they started messing with him. Feathered gorgons appeared at the doors, all doors, backing him into dark corners. They pulled Fosse from his Latin conjugations onto their laps, crushing his face in fingers and tongues, twirling his perfect hair and the cock in his tuxedo pants. Scared and alone, he did as he was told. Even if that meant doing what no good boy should do, he did it, because if he cried out, they’d blow his cover and he’d be out of the show for good, and what would he tell his mother?
    In the tense secondsbefore he was about to go on, they came from behind him, kneading his pants. As they jerked him off, Bobby ran the conscious part of his brain through the Cubs starting lineup and National League batting averages, while the other part of him, the part that couldn’t get to Wrigley Field or Sunday school, got harder and harder and—
    “Come
on,
kid.”
    He heard his name followed by something about “Chicago’s youngest . . . ,” and a drumbeat later he was pummeled with a hot beam of spotlight.
    He was onstage.
    “Ladies and gentlemen . . .”
    The piano twanged, and without thinking, Bobby started tapping out “Tea for Two,” with one sweaty hand on his top hat and the other on a coattail he held between his bulge and the audience. They laughed. Half the jokes he told he was too young to understand, so he could never be sure if they were laughing at the punch line or heckling him.
    Then there was the war. The war he wasn’t fighting in.
    “Hey, where’s your uniform, buddy?”
    “What’s the matter? You shirking?”
    Even if what they were doing to him felt wrong, doing what he was told felt right.
    “Oh, Bobby . . .”
    His parents were so proud of him.
    “Come
on,
Bobby . . .”
    Something must have been seriously, shamefully wrong with him, because, despite everything he should have run from—the fondling, the sinning, the heckling, and the shirking—to him, having the strippers’ attention felt a little like being a star. Years later, he would tell Janice Lynde, a girlfriend, the women were like mothers to him. “They were affectionate,”Lynde said. “Maybe too affectionate.” Perhaps that was the source of the confusion. Perhaps that’s why night after night, he came back, like a shell-shocked veteran, even long after he left Chicago. “I can romanticize it,”he said forty years later, “but it was an awful life. I was very lonely, very scared. You know, hotel rooms in strange towns, and I was all alone, thirteen or fourteen, too shy to talk to anyone, not really knowing what it was all about, and among—not the best people . . . I think it’s done me a lot of harm, being exposed to things that early that I shouldn’t have been exposed to . . . it left some scar that I have not quite been able to figure out.” He was drawn to the girls, then hurt by them. “It was schizophrenic,”Fosse said. He couldn’t get away from it and he didn’t want to.
    “It just wasn’t the same worldmy mother and father had told me it was,” he said. “The battle going on inside me was just tremendous.” On the one hand, being a dancer troubled the track star in him. On the other, being a dancer got him attention. It got him girls. And as for those girls, he knew of two kinds, separated by night and day. One variety, at the Cuban Village,spun tassels in his face. The other variety, at Amundsen, wore skirts and demurred when kissed. And his parents, who seemed to love him, who took him to every soda counter in the neighborhood for his birthday, also condoned, by their ignorance, Bobby’s scared nights alone. They abandoned him, he’d later feel, to a world no child, let alone an unaccompanied child, should be exposed to. To bolster his nerve, he would replay his mother’s favorite piece of encouragement, “It will put hair on