Tango Bitches from Hell: Lapushka: Little Paw, Warm Heart, Hard as Steel

              

               It never gets above freezing in Hell. Not many people knew that but Lapushka did: she was from there. Blagoveshchensk, Russia, is the highway out of hell and one day she took it and ended up in America dancing tango. At 47, most people’s childhood memories dim but not hers. She was in the arms of a tall man of African descent, dancing at a milonga somewhere in the Big Apple when she flashed back.

               In the village where she grew up....huh, she thought, ‘grew up’? She had never stopped growing up, she was not done; that term was wrong. In the town she no longer called home, New York was now her home, she had long since given up hope that she was a real princess like the one she portrayed in the class play at her school in grade two.

               At fourteen, she was becoming a woman although she could not see it when she looked at herself in the mirror. Yuri sensed it. He had been molesting her for two years, this man who owned the house where she ate and sometimes slept. She learned long ago the importance of waking up and hiding whenever he came home at night, drunk, looking for her. Often she spent the nights outside with the sled dogs who kept her warm while she worked on her homework by the light of the moon. Somehow, she knew that school was the path out of this place, out of hell, and she focused on it, disciplined herself to memorization and to the presentation of her work to her educators.

               At 14, she won a scholarship to a higher school in Blagoveshchensk. The night she left was the last night she had to cuddle up with the huskies for warmth. This was her one fond memory of that place and it served only as a reference to how awful her life there really was.

               In Blagoveshchensk, she excelled and was invited to attend a respectable university in Moscow. She was given a stipend to find an apartment and to buy food. Yagi, the man she was dancing with, led a boleo. She executed it with perfection and to the fullest extension she could attain. The spike of her left heel struck a man dancing close to her and her partner. It was Ethan. She would have liked to have danced with him but now she was sure that would not happen for a while.

               She liked kicking men. In Moscow, she attended self defense classes for the entire time she lived there. The only living quarters she could find was in a building inhabited by mostly Chechens. They were a hard and cruel people but she knew them from Blagoveshchensk. She could defend herself against the known, it was the unknown that she feared the most.

               By the time she was eighteen, she had developed a successful routine of study, self-defense training and traveling safely to and from her apartment. She was safe there, in her room behind the door with many locks and bolts. She analyzed the comings and goings of the Chechens in her building to discern the best times to depart or attempt entry. She wasn’t always successful. Each unfortunate encounter reinforced her need to do well at school.

               She liked to listen to music and jog. She scheduled dance classes whenever she could but they were always unfulfilling. She could feel the music in her bones and she longed to let it loose. She was now dancing with Kash, a tall man with tan skin and black hair. He smelled funny. He was not a good leader but he danced with lots of women and she needed to see why he was so popular. Fortunately, he had never been the recipient of a heel to the thigh so he did not have that memory when he decided to invite her to dance.

               Dancing was all a game of numbers, she thought. She noticed that men liked to dance with many women and, even in a city as large as NYC, she would eventually get to dance with all the men she wanted simply by making herself available.
               What she hadn’t counted on were the men. Not all the men, just some of them. These men were not the mindless, drunken slobs, prone to long periods of couch-sitting in front of the television that she had known throughout her life.

               Kash took her into a series of volcadas perfectly timed to the music. The sequence made her smile and almost made her forget about work, but how could she? It had been such a big part of her life, it was nearly impossible for that to happen. Work was certainly much better than school, she appreciated the compensation very much but it was demanding and there was always the threat of going back to there, back to hell, that place beyond, and before, Blagoveshchensk.

               Her partner was getting excited, she could feel it in his body. It was not the typical arousal she had come to expect from men. Kash was lost in the music. He was so carried away that he was having difficulty translating the music into movements and conveying it through his body language. She had to help. She had to guess what he intended to lead. Was that a series of promenade steps? She went into the maneuver and guessed wrong. She could feel the man holding her collapse like a house of cards, and then there was the inevitable disappointment: he blamed her.

               She knew it was not her fault and felt no remorse. She had experienced him and now that was in the past. There were more men. Many more men. There was work, lots of work. She thought about tomorrow’s presentation and all the players involved; who would be prepared, who would not be; who was the client and what were their real expectations.

               Is that Peter over there looking at me? He’s such a strange man. Something about him reminds me of subject number four, the cat who survived all the radiation treatments and made it to the end of the clinical trials. He was a mess and very accident prone. How did he get into that clothes dryer and how on earth did he ever manage to survive an hour-long cycle of high heat?

               Peterovich. He likes me. What was I doing tomorrow at work? Why does he like me? I’m not good looking. He can dance with many good-looking tangueras. Where did I store my presentation on my laptop? Where will I park? Somehow he reminds me of subfour. He called me ‘Lapushka’ once. He’s stupid, he doesn’t know any Russian. He doesn’t know that that is…..a silly name.

               He feels the music. Yes, walk, take it slow, I like that. What was I supposed to be doing? Of course we will dance another tanda, silly, we are not done. Yes, I like that. What? You’ve never done that before, but I like that, too. Why do you look at me that way? Like I’m a princess. Now I remember that place. It was awful. I’ve never told anyone that before, not even in my thoughts. I never want to go back. I want to stay here and dance tango.  Yes, that is what I want. I understand, you wish to dance with other women. Thank you for taking me back there, for making me forget about work, for making me realize, once again, why I want to be here.

              

              

               Note: For an in-depth look into the mind of the Kayak Hombre, read his book, available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/River-Tango-perri-iezzoni/dp/1453865527/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369366756&sr=1-1&keywords=River+tango