An Erecphany

I was the first to change dance forever.

I never realized that my dedication would have led to my demise.

I was only twenty-four the day I walked down Martha Graham's apartment building in downtown Manhattan. I have just finished my last year at Julliard, and Trisha Brown told me she was going to be doing this exciting new dance, that would make people question what dance was. She ask if I wanted to be involved with it. I said yes. Why not? I was finishing up Julliard, and I needed a gig.

The first day I met her was in 1968, during my friend's senior dance recital. She ask him over to her place after the recital. That is when I realized that she enjoyed the sensual aesthetics of young men. She enjoyed them as much as I liked older women, twenty-one years older. Our lives together were mystical, magical, like a Greek love story. I fed her grapes in the morning and drank of her wine and she of my wine. This was our ritual, well until Peter Mullen walked in that door, that door made from the finest mahogany in the east. The door that I knocked three times before she answered it in her blue transparent nighty. He only had to knock once, and she was there. They both had so much in common: artists, age, books, and men. I became a third wheel to them, even though he was the same age as her, but he made her laugh. Ha - I made her laugh - I made her cum. Peter Muller, to me, only became a parasite that needed to be removed.

The day was August 5th 1970, and I was about to decline headfirst down a thirty story building. I never understood the meaning behind the choreography. I only knew that it would change me forever, because she said it would. I was harnessed, tied, and ready to belay down the building. I looked down to see a small crowd of spectators. I hung there like a jumper ready to end it all. If only I knew this event foreshadowed my final day, I might not have done it. I sat thinking how Peter asked her to marry him.

How about me!?!

They saw me as their toy. I played for both teams, but I got tired of the threesomes and the lies. I was their puppet, tied to this building. This giant erect building. A puppet wanting a pair of scissors. I was not only their metaphorical puppet, but now they allowed me to literally be their puppet, hanging on a string as they watched and filmed me. He filmed it; she watched it. As I walked slowly down my own erections in search of my brain, it began to blow

What the hell was I doing letting them use me like that!?!

I felt used; I felt like killing one of them. I felt like a shave. I walked down their building. I amused their audience. I fed their egos, especially, when the dance critics praised it as innovated and brilliant. I untied that rope and walked over to Peter and punched him in the jaw - I dreamt. My shame hung there on the ledge; until ten years later, when I decided to return and go down the building without a rope. The only joy I received, by doing this, was when I read the New York Times, page D5. A critic wrote about Muller's short film about the dance, " The lines of the screen camouflaged the lines hugging them, holding them perpendicular to the viewers standing on the ground."

What the hell did it mean? Whatever it meant, it was the only thing written about his film, which made me smile.

A year later, August 13th 1971, their abuse of my loyalty, my insecurities, my overly sexed-up drive, halted. They decided to do another show, one at the Whitney. This time they included some of my old school mates. Barbara Dilley, Carma Beuchat, and Douglas Durn. He wore a small headband while walking on the walls. Why you needed to know that, is trivial. He was also the friend, the one who I mentioned earlier, the one where I met her at his recital. They all came to be their puppets. They all gathered around to walk on the walls of the museum. Now that the hype was over about the man who walked on a building, She thought it would be interesting to see more bodies walking on walls, instead of just mine. Brown and Muller spent most of their nights together thinking how to improve my stunt. And the only thing they came up with was more people walking in a room, on all four walls, backwards and forwards.

I was tired at this point. I was finished with all their games. I told them I did not want to be in this piece. They yelped at me with the same pompous rhetoric that any ungrateful person hears, once they feel used. I shouted back; I even punched Peter in the jaw, and slapped her, that felt good. That was the day I left the two of them, and that is why she had to be in the piece, Walking on the Wall. That was the only thing I remembered before I jumped from the building. That and all the critics wrote that they should of only did, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building. That was the end of both of their careers.

The last words that passed my lips, when I hit the side of the building with my forehead, were: Aaaassss yyyyyou wwwwwwish.


*erecphany n 1. a sudden understanding of a metaphysical concept while being fully erect or being on an erect structure.